Richard Gere is getting a taste of what “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi’s been cooking.
Page Six has learned the actor, who is divorcing wife Carey Lowell, has been very recently and quietly dating Lakshmi. A source tells us, “They have been quietly spending some time together. It is all very new and recent, and happened while he has been filming in New York.”
Page Six revealed in September that Gere, 64, and Lowell, 52, were splitting after 11 years of marriage. The couple have a son, Homer, and co-owned the Bedford Post Inn in Westchester County. Previously, Gere was married to Cindy Crawford.
Lakshmi, also a former model, was married to author Salman Rushdie for three years until they divorced in 2007. She then dated billionaire Teddy Forstmann until he died of brain cancer in 2011. The foodie also has a beautiful 3-year-old daughter, Krishna Thea Lakshmi-Dell, with Adam Dell, the venture capitalist brother of computer maker Michael Dell.
Gere is currently in New York filming “Time Out of Mind,” in which he plays a homeless man trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The usually dapper silver fox was photographed in character as the homeless man looking scruffy and taking a leak on the street in New York during filming for a scene in the movie, which Gere is also producing.
Reps for Gere and Lakshmi had no comment.