If you’ve watched America’s Culinary Cup, the newest series hosted and produced by former Top Chef star and lingerie designer Padma Lakshmi, you’ll know it’s still finding its feet. The show has a lot of great stuff going on: a-tier talent, an entertaining judges panel, and a fun premise with some interesting and unique challenges. Yet, like every fledgling series, it hasn’t fully figured it out, yet. I’m definitely going to need one tweak if the show gets renewed rather than canceled by CBS.
I Have A Love/Hate Relationship With One Culinary Cup Formatting Ploy
One thing Padma notes early on in Season 1 of Culinary Cup is that she was inspired by the train schedules at Grand Central Station when she created the leaderboard for the show. In theory, this choice is inspired. We get to see letters shifting until the settle on the rankings of the contestants after each challenge. It’s a little confusing to explain, but it looks like this.
In theory, I should love this. It’s a creative way to create suspense with the contestants but also the viewers competing. Tournament of Champions does something similar with its bracket reveal, but the flipping is more engaging in America’s Culinary Cup. So, what’s the issue?
In practicality, it drives me completely bonkers, particularly during early to mid episodes of the first season. In the video above, you can see we are down to three contestants, so when the letters click into place, it’s easy to see who is in first, second and third place. However, when there are more than 3-4 contestants left on the CBS reality series we don’t get enough time to see the contestant order and really let it sink in.
Instead, we get a quick shot of the leaderboard, and I’m constantly having to pause my screen to see who landed in the top, middle and bottom during a given round. It’s especially egregious given how long the series spends showing us all of the letters flipping and churning and working themselves into place. And then we just get the teensiest of result shots? I had no idea something so minor could be this infuriating.
I honestly got into this show a little late, so I’ve been watching it on my computer with my Paramount+ subscription. Ergo, I am perfectly able to pause my screen and sort of see what’s what with the standings before moving forward. That’s still annoying, but I have no idea if people are getting the full story if they watched the show live on the 2026 TV schedule.
Anyway, America’s Culinary Cup was a really interesting experiment for CBS to get into a cooking show. I know it hasn’t done nearly as well as Survivor 50 in the Wednesday slot, but listen, even this iconic Survivor season has had some down moments. In addition, I know some other viewers have not loved how much of the show is devoted to the judges panel and some other minor formatting quirks. However, with a few tweaks, I do think it could be really good. We’ll have to wait and see whether it makes the list of canceled shows this TV season.