This month, she’s introducing her first main undertaking below her personal title. Gohar World is a line of house décor items created together with her sister, the painter Nadia Gohar, 32. It’s one thing they’d mentioned for years, however that didn’t fairly begin materializing till the pandemic, when Laila’s events-based work largely got here to a standstill. Available solely on-line for now, Gohar World is launching with about 40 objects — greater than half of which have been produced in Egypt — together with desk linens, glassware and wearables for each individuals and meals: There is a bib for adults, and a lace bonnet for a tomato.
“In the same way that you dress yourself, we think that you can dress your food,” says Gohar, whose enlargement into housewares will even embrace product collaborations with Hay and Byredo, coming later this 12 months. It’s the subsequent evolution in a profession that has all the time been troublesome for her to outline. “I actually hate when people call me a ‘food artist,’” she says. Sometimes she corrects it and different occasions she lets it go, however the phrase typically makes her roll her eyes. “I’m not an artist that makes commercial work that gets sold at a gallery, and I’m not a chef in the traditional sense. I don’t work in a restaurant or associate with a restaurant. I’m somewhere in between, so I understand why people say that about me. But something about it feels pretentious and makes me uncomfortable.”
For a very long time, she discovered it troublesome to outline herself in any respect. And this, too, is what makes her really feel a bit like that koi fish jelly. “Eventually, I learned to accept the fact that I don’t fit in,” she says, “and that’s part of what makes me stand out.”
The surreal centerpiece is deceptively simple to make, Gohar insists. She has made variations of the fish plenty of occasions, together with as soon as for her good friend Simone Rocha. Sometimes, she makes use of butter as an alternative of jelly. And, although she works primarily from her studio in Manhattan’s Two Bridges neighborhood, the dish is straightforward sufficient to whip up in her smaller house kitchen on the Upper West Side, the place she’s lived since February together with her boyfriend, the chef Ignacio Mattos of the eating places Altro Paradiso, Lodi and Estela. It’s the sort of dish that friends take into account spectacular however house cooks discover daunting, she says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, I could never do that. That looks crazy.’ But actually it requires very few ingredients.”
