Padma Lakshmi's Taste The Nation Is Returning For A New Season

It's official. According to a recent press release, a new season of "Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi" will soon be streaming on Hulu. The show's first season, which explores the many regional and cultural traditions that are part of American cuisine, aired in 2020 and received plaudits aplenty. The show's initial season earned it a James Beard Foundation Award for Visual Media and two Critics Choice Real TV Awards, honoring both the show and Lakshmi.

A follow-up, "Taste the Nation: Holiday Edition," was released in 2021. The four-episode series is sometimes credited as the second season of "Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi," but that's not entirely accurate. Although Hulu green-lighted a second season in 2020 — which, like the first, would feature 10 episodes — that season ended up being truncated due to the coronavirus pandemic and was instead rebranded as a holiday edition. Thus, the second season of the Hulu Original series is the upcoming one, which premieres on May 5.

Lakshmi previewed the upcoming season in an exclusive interview with Tasting Table in January, but thanks to the announcement from Hulu, the full schedule of shows, locations, and topics have now been released.

According to Hulu, the second season will feature 10 episodes. Since explorations of identity and specifically the culinary traditions of immigrant and indigenous communities are a staple of "Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi," fans of the show can expect several deep dives into unique cultural traditions during the second season. For example, the second episode, "From Kabul with Love," looks at the Afghan American community in our nation's capital, Washington D.C. The fourth episode, "The Borscht Identity," explores borscht, the beet-based soup, and its issues of identity through the lens of Ukrainian communities in New York City.

"Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi" also travels to Appalachia, where Lakshmi tries food throughout the Mountain South and discovers how their "humble ingredients" continue to recreate and improve new recipes. The show journeys to other places like Daly City, California, Tarpon Springs, Florida, Lowell, Massachusetts, Dearborn, Michigan, Houston, Texas, and Puerto Rico during the show's second season. Puerto Rico, in fact, is the site of the season's kick-off episode, "Ketchup or No Ketchup," which spotlights whether it's appropriate to put the condiment on one of the American territory's signature dishes, pasteles.