Care As Culture and Cuisine with Telly Justice and Camille Lindsley of HAGS

What does it mean to create a culinary space that centers care and honors the lived experiences of diners, staff, and suppliers alike? Meet Telly Justice and Camille Lindsley: the dream team behind HAGS and the self-described “queer couple opening an unapologetically queer restaurant in NYC.” With Justice as executive chef and Lindsley as sommelier, they have created a one-of-a-kind space that simultaneously serves up the best of fine-dining and sliding-scale communal meals.

In honor of Pride Month, we caught up with Justice and Lindsley on the inspiration behind HAGS, what a queer restaurant means to them, and their proudest moments as they approach the one-year anniversary of the restaurant’s opening.

Yasmin Hariri: Let’s start at the beginning of the HAGS story – when did you discover a passion for food?

Telly Justice: I grew up on the outskirts of Philadelphia and mealtime was never a very significant thing for [our family]. After leaving the Philadelphia area, there was a learning curve for me in learning how to cook for myself first, then how to cook professionally and slowly building a toolset. Being a queer person in the South in the early 2000s, cafe jobs were easy to get back then. Getting a foot in the door as a barista, and then quickly pressing vegan paninis and quesadillas was an easy thing to do as a young queer punk in Savannah, Georgia.

As I got more closely enmeshed in the local queer community and queer potlucks, especially Food Not Bombs, I started to experience a more personal and emotional relationship to feeding people and intertwining feeding with community care.  

Here at HAGS, that is still the root of what inspires us and where we come from with our cuisine: having care as the central aspect and orienting the culture of the cuisine through queer culture and community building.  

Hariri: That’s so beautiful, care as core to HAGS’ roots. In what ways does care inspire the menu as you continue to evolve it?

Justice: We look at care from a lot of different angles. For the staff, is this work that they're capable of doing, and that they're excited about? Are these flavors that they feel represented by? Is this food that I feel represented by, and that makes me feel seen as a queer person?  

Finally, in the dining room, are we ensuring that the food is [made with awareness] of allergies, dining restrictions, and dining preferences? Is it accommodating the people coming in as they are, without having to do too much re-tooling that makes the dining room feel like a burden? That’s the last thing we want—we want the menu to feel like it was written for you.

We also work really closely with farms and purveyors that we have personal relationships with and ensure that the food on the plate is wholesome, nurturing, substantial sustenance. I want people to leave feeling good without any fear of entering the wellness field, which we’ve done a lot of work on with disordered eating groups. And that's something that I think is so rarely touched upon in restaurants, but it should be. Especially as a queer restaurant, it's something we think about a lot because there's such a large overlap of queer diners and folks that have experience with disordered eating, either themselves or with partners or family members.

Hariri: That’s amazing. In addition to care as this central value, it’s clear that HAGS has a true dedication to being community-driven and accessible through offerings like Pay What You Can Sundays. How did this impact your approach to opening the restaurant and determining the norms you wanted to redefine in your space?

Camille Lindsley: Sundays have always been part of the vision for HAGS. Sometimes, we get asked “why are you fine dining?” or “why are you also giving away food for free on Sunday?” and it’s sort of funny to see how the combination of these two seemingly antithetical ideas is so puzzling to some. For us, we never wanted to be just a fine-dining restaurant. Nor did we ever feel like we would be satisfied in executing our creative visions by just doing something like Sundays all the time, nor is that financially viable.

When thinking about the restaurant we wanted to open, having a day where we could tap into that same feeling of queer potlucks and remembering why food is such a powerful tool for getting people together was very important to us. We're a very small restaurant and our tasting menu is a great way to deliver a special experience in a sort of precious way to individual tables, but Sundays have a collective sense of everyone sharing the experience. We always say that Sundays are as much for us and the staff as they are for the guests.  

Hariri: What is your proudest moment so far?

Lindsley: One of my proudest moments was a couple of months ago when we got to feed Chase Strangio (Deputy Director of Transgender Justice, ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Project) who is fighting so hard for our community in dark and desperate times and is such a champion for trans rights and queers everywhere. Getting to share a very intimate and meaningful dinner with somebody fighting in a very different way for a similar kind of world to exist was incredibly rewarding.

Justice: That's a good one. It feels corny to say opening, but we’ve been open almost a year and I am still riding that high of just being able to do this. One of the things that makes HAGS feel like such an authentic place is that in many ways, we never really thought that we would get to do this or get this far. I know for a lot of folks in this industry, ownership always feels a little out of reach, but for others there’s a built-in aspect of [expecting they'll] get to that place. We didn’t have that perspective. Even on opening day, it felt like a dream. We're grateful for the work that we're doing and every day that we get to unlock the door [at HAGS], I’m so proud.

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Yasmin Hariri is branded content manager at the James Beard Foundation.