Tina Leu
Cynthia Chavez Lamar
When Cynthia Chavez Lamar (San Felipe Pueblo/Hopi/Tewa/Navajo) became director of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in 2022, she made history as the first Native American woman to head a Smithsonian museum. Since then, she’s been deepening relationships with tribal communities whose cultures are represented in the institution’s collections. “We want audiences to learn from Native artists, leaders, and cultural bearers just how meaningful a piece of pottery or a cradleboard is,” says the curator and scholar, who’s been named one of the most powerful women in Washington, DC. “It’s so important that audiences recognise that Indigenous peoples are very much part of the fabric of American and global society.” NMAI is leading the national charge when it comes to repatriation and shared stewardship of tribal artefacts. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, but we’re coming at it with the mindset that it’s a very different day and age [regarding] ideas of ownership and care,” Chavez Lamar says. She’s looking forward to this summer’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival focused on Indigenous Voices of the Americas (complete with cultural programming, musical performances, cooking demos, and more), when she hopes to see the National Mall filled with Native visitors – just like it was for the 2022 dedication of the National Native American Veterans Memorial, one of her proudest accomplishments. If NMAI museum goers come away with just one lesson, she asks that it be an understanding that Native peoples “have been part of American history since the very beginning, even before written history.” KN
Aditi Dugar
Growing up in a large multigenerational family in Mumbai, Aditi Dugar has long known what an elaborate kitchen operation looks like. “I had 15 first cousins, so every meal was like a catering event,” she says. It was handy prep for when, in her twenties, she swapped a career in finance for food. “I’m a hustler,” she says, recounting how, without formal training, she pressed her way into an apprenticeship at Le Gavroche in London, then persuaded her family to let her run a boutique catering company (“non-vegetarian food in a Marwari household is a sensitive subject”). When Dugar came across a disused space in a textile mill compound in Mumbai, the seeds of a new kind of dining destination were sown. After 18 months of travelling across India to meet farmers, she and Prateek Sadhu, an exciting young chef, opened Masque in 2016 with an ingredients-first approach combined with a New Nordic-style multi-sensory dining experience – all served via a chef’s tasting menu. “The first few years were great because diners had never seen anything like it,” she says. But when Sadhu left in 2022, Dugar – intuiting another shift in the Indian palette – saw an opportunity to double down on regional cooking. A year later, with chef Varun Totlani at its helm, Masque topped India’s restaurants on Asia’s 50 Best, making Dugar the first Indian woman restaurateur to feature on it. “We combine things like seaweed harvested from Goa with seasonal green ponkh from Gujrat for our spin on bhel,” says Dugar. In January this year, Masque took to the road, with a pop-up at Nahargarh Fort on the fringes of the Ranthambore forest, and then in a mango farm in Chennai, where 100 diners sat at a single wooden table for a dinner by India’s top chefs, including Totlani. “Everyone says fine-dining Indian restaurants aren’t valuable investments, and they’re wrong,” says Dugar, “But Masque is more than that: it’s a platform to showcase India – and there’s an exciting future in that.” Arati Menon
Courtesy The Luxury Collection
Laila Gohar
Just as many travellers pick up souvenirs, Cairo-born artist Laila Gohar gathers morsels of creative fuel as she moves through the world. “Inspiration is not a linear process – it’s sort of like a web of visual and nonvisual cues, and those that resonate leave a little flash or impression on the brain.” The tease of crochet in a restaurant check-holder in Porto, Portugal, for example, might later influence a collection of delightfully bizarre housewares for Gohar World (the eccentric tableware brand she founded with her sister, Nadia), or an installation of eight-foot-tall cakes filling the garden of the Prince de Galles, a Luxury Collection Hotel, in Paris, part of her role as Global Explorer for The Luxury Collection. “When you travel, you have heightened senses,” says Gohar. “I feel like you become a sponge, ready for new experiences.” As much as travel energises Gohar, her often absurdist designs leave an imprint on the places she visits, too. In addition to Paris, she worked with artisans in Kyoto on a barware collection for The Luxury Collection. She also recently completed an installation for Mexico City Art Week, featuring a room of photographs layered with food items, and is headed to Milan in April to lend her touch to design fair Salone Mobile. The world of Gohar doesn’t end there: “My dream is to design an amusement park,” she muses, describing an Epcot-like experience where instead of moving through various countries, you’d explore further afield, like the moon or sun. In the more immediate future, Gohar and her partner, chef and restaurateur Ignacio Mattos, hope to fuse their hospitality know-how into an experience set on this planet. “We dream about buying a felucca, a traditional ancient Egyptian boat, and transforming it into a hotel,” she says. “A little bit Orient Express, but we’d lean more into Egyptian history, and there’d be dining experiences in remote towns along the Nile, where there’s nothing around, and it feels surreal and magical.” May we all look forward to fighting for a booking. Megan Spurrell
