The prepared foods counter at Happier Grocery on Canal Street in Manhattan is usually a hotbed of chaos and activity on a weekday evening, as shoppers at the upscale spot jostle to fill their carts with $36 rotisserie chickens and $28 green goddess salads.
For two hours on a recent Wednesday, only one woman was manning the counter, handing out grilled cheese sandwiches to a crowd that had gathered there: the model and influencer Nara Aziza Smith, who has built an online audience of nearly 17 million people, a number larger than the combined populations of Austria and Switzerland, by sharing videos of herself making prodigiously elaborate meals for her husband and their passel of small children as it has grown from two, to three, to four.
In a hotel room not far away, her youngest child, Fawnie Golden Smith, not yet 2 months old, was napping in the care of a nanny.
Wearing red heels and a JW Anderson mini dress printed with pots and pans, with nary an apron in sight, Ms. Smith flipped the grilled cheeses as people in the throng of mostly young women watched in rapt attention, their phones out and set to record. She pulled the sandwiches into halves with a slow and dramatic flourish, revealing a perfectly melted center of fontina and mozzarella.
Once the gooey confections had all found takers, Ms. Smith came out from behind the counter to mingle with fans who had lined up to take selfies with her, eagerly asking everyone what they thought of the sandwich and the accompanying tomato soup she had prepared. Both were doused liberally in a cooking and finishing oil made from algae and steeped in garlic, which Ms. Smith spent the last year developing with Algae Cooking Club, a company that specializes in oils produced by fermenting microalgae in large stainless steel tanks.
Called Nara’s Roasted Garlic Oil and also flavored with yuzu and miso, it was what gave an extra-sharp tang to her soup and sandwiches, she said. For Ms. Smith, the release of the $28 oil — the first culinary product on which she has put her own imprimatur — was a milestone moment, one that she hopes will help her go from being seen as a mere TikTok influencer to a businesswoman with serious ambitions.
“We went through countless ideations of the product, like a yuzu garlic chili oil, toning up the yuzu, toning down the garlic, having it more roasted, adding scallions, adding all of these different things,” Ms. Smith said. “And it really took a year for me to be super satisfied with the product.”
Her appearance at Happier Grocery culminated a whirlwind day of events and meetings, for which Ms. Smith, 24, had traveled to Manhattan from her home in Connecticut with her newborn and her husband of about six years, the model Lucky Blue Smith. (He headed back to Connecticut soon after they had arrived to shepherd their eldest daughter, 5-year-old Rumble Honey Smith, to a doctor’s appointment.)
The first stop on Ms. Smith’s itinerary was at the restaurant Eleven Madison Park, for a meeting with her agent and the Algae Cooking Club team. (The company’s culinary director, Daniel Humm, is the chef at Eleven Madison Park.) Snuggling her sleeping newborn to her chest, Ms. Smith reviewed sales numbers as well as the final cuts of an Algae Cooking Club commercial she had starred in.
“I have no notes, which is very rare for me,” Ms. Smith said with a grin, gesturing toward her agent, Amy Black, who nodded in the affirmative.
After a break for breastfeeding, Ms. Smith, along with her newborn and Ms. Black, took a black SUV to a Sweetgreen outpost in the East Village, where they were met by the Algae Cooking Club founder, Kas Saidi. The salad chain is one of many businesses with which Ms. Smith is exploring projects involving her new garlic oil, and an area of the store had been cordoned off so that the group could taste-test four different salads to determine which one went best with the product.
Holding her newborn to her chest, Ms. Smith deftly sampled the greens that had been laid out for her, deciding that kale held up the best (and arugula the worst) when drenched with her namesake oil. Afterward, she got up to meet Sweetgreen staff members who were clamoring to take pictures with her, handing off her baby to Ms. Black.
“It is really important for me to have longevity in my career,” Ms. Smith said. “I intend to have a really longstanding career and business and empire eventually — that I am going to build.”
Mogul would be a new identity for Ms. Smith, who, in her social media videos, has fashioned herself as an almost cartoonishly perfect homemaker.
More performance art than how-to guides, many videos feature Ms. Smith dressed in elaborate couture as she narrates her processes for making items both quotidian (fresh butter, sourdough loaves) and outlandish (bubble gum, Coca-Cola, moisturizer and, perhaps most ill-advised, sunscreen). She speaks in an unflappably placid voice and closes videos with the sign-off “from scratch” — a catchphrase that brings to mind those used by others who have built empires on their culinary prowess, like Martha Stewart (“It’s a good thing!”) and Julia Child (“Bon appetit!”).
When Ms. Smith first started posting on TikTok, many who followed her saw a certain irony in the way she kneaded dough and baked bread in impractical high-fashion looks and immaculately styled hair. She fueled that perception by including the hashtag #easyrecipe in captions for videos featuring some of her more labor-intensive endeavors, a joke that, along with her catchphrase, led some fans to leave comments asking her to make them a man from scratch.
But as her videos traveled online, others started to see Ms. Smith not as a tongue-in-cheek domestic diva, but as someone trying to influence women to conform to archaic gender roles and a lifestyle of cooking and homemaking. Critics labeled her as a tradwife.
“People were just so negative on the internet about me, and I didn’t quite understand it,” said Ms. Smith, who started working as a model in her teens.
Part of her confusion stemmed from the fact that her videos highlighted what she considers to be a genuine passion. “Cooking is a love language to me,” Ms. Smith said. “I love cooking for my kids. I love cooking for my husband. I love cooking for my freaking self, like I just love it so much.”
Creating the garlic oil was a way she has tried to shift the conversation about her. Another was the recent release of a capsule collection of dresses that Ms. Smith developed with Reformation while she was pregnant with her newborn. “I want to branch out and do a bunch of different things,” she said. “I would love to write a cookbook. One day, I would love to have a brand.”
As she has forged ahead with new projects, she has also embraced a new perspective about the way people see her.
“I’ll never correct what people think about me,” she said. “I’ve learned that it’s a projection of people’s feelings, not so much about what I do.”
The post She Wants to Build a Culinary Empire From Scratch appeared first on New York Times.
