Telly Justice is the chef and co-founder of HAGS, a restaurant in New York City’s East Village known for its hospitality-driven approach to fine dining. In 2025, Justice was named one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs.
Raised outside Philadelphia, Justice did not grow up cooking and entered adulthood with little experience in the kitchen. After leaving the suburbs at 18 for Columbia, South Carolina, she began working in food service at a local vegan café, where she learned foundational kitchen skills and developed an interest in cooking as a means of care and community building. During this period, she also became involved with Food Not Bombs and other food justice initiatives, experiences that helped shape her long-term approach to hospitality.
Justice’s early professional path was unconventional. A longtime musician in punk bands, she was drawn to underground culture and communal spaces before turning fully toward cooking. As her ambitions grew, she sought experience in more demanding kitchens, working in both Atlanta and New York. In 2015, while cooking at Kimball House in Decatur, Georgia, she met her eventual business and life partner, Camille Lindsley.
Justice later returned to the South to deepen her connection to Southern hospitality, sustainability, and foodways. Her most formative professional experiences during this time included working at Eugene in Atlanta with Linton Hopkins and leading the kitchen at Hugh Acheson’s Five & Ten.
In 2019, Justice and Lindsley moved to New York with the goal of opening a project of their own. Justice cooked at Contra and Wildair, while Lindsley worked at Aldo Sohm Wine Bar. During the pandemic, they launched HAGS as a pop-up centered on community support and sliding-scale pricing. The brick-and-mortar restaurant opened in the summer of 2022, offering omnivore and vegan tasting menus and a pay-what-you-can brunch, and establishing HAGS as a distinctive, inclusive presence in New York’s dining landscape.
