Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Telly Justice of HAGS

I would probably feel really sad, and I’d want to feel like a little bit of home. I think lasagna is the most important emotional comfort food for me. I would want a big, crunchy, steamy pan of lasagna, and then you can eat it for days.

I don’t really hold onto memories of eating food so much, but I do hold onto memories of cooking food. I have this one memory from the pandemic, before we were a pop-up, before we knew that we were going to do something like HAGS. We were down in Georgia visiting my family, and it was Mother’s Day, and I made my mom this recipe for this old-fashioned cream pie, that’s a family recipe. And this is not a family of cooks, so there are very few family recipes! I had never made this recipe before, but my mom had made it, it was the one thing that I knew she felt good about. My parents and I have had a complicated relationship, and it was an incredible experience to get to cook this pie for her and eat it with her on Mother’s Day, at the very start of the pandemic.

Also, the first time I ever ate at a MICHELIN-starred restaurant was my 24th birthday, and I traveled to New York to eat at Daniel. They had three stars at the time, and I knew nothing about anything, and I didn’t know what that meant, but my partner found this restaurant on the internet. Like, this is a famous restaurant in New York City, we should go eat there. We asked them to prepare a vegan tasting menu. As a vegan at the time, I didn’t know that that was an unusual request. I showed up in a dress, full face of makeup, and this was 2011, and they treated me so well, they treated me so kindly and compassionately, and they cooked us this vegan tasting menu. We were these two young, 20-something-year-old, queer, trans kids that had never experienced fine dining before, and they really made us feel like we were superstars. I remember dishes from them, still—there was this trio of ratatouille bites, and it was the first time I ate eggplant where I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. I was working at a vegan cafe at the time, pressing paninis and stuff like that. I was just flabbergasted by the concepts and the textures and flavors, but also the hospitality.

Fine dining means caring for the person in front of you in the best, most extensive way that you can. I think frequently about wanting to leave our guests better than when they had arrived, which is why we have fentanyl test strips in the bathroom. And I see that as a hallmark of our philosophy, our ethos of fine dining. And we want to make sure that this experience and the hospitality we provide is intentionally crafted for the person that’s here, and not some dreamed up or hypothetical version of the perfect diner, or the perfect guest. It's very hospitality driven. It's about generosity and it’s about care.

We’re obviously big dreamers, and I have a tendency of planting a million seeds. It’s kind of like seeing what grows and gravitating towards them. So we always have a lot of irons in the fire, but I think the things that I feel most excited and passionate about is really looking forward to an opportunity to grow and expand HAGS beyond this space. I think we’re getting to a place where we see a bigger HAGS existing, and want to start building that. There’s a limit to what we can do here and we wanted to expand the tasting menu to show off what our staff could really do, but there’s a limit to what you can do in such a small space.

And I’m excited to be entertaining conversations about writing a book. I think that would be really great. I think a HAGS cookbook could be really cool. The chef/restaurant cookbook scene right now is not really moving units, so that might be a longer-term goal.

And seeing what Mark Bittman’s doing, I feel a certain excitement and passion for, at some point, moving toward a nonprofit sector alignment, and what that could look like, and how we could use what we’ve built to be helpful to a larger community.

I’ve really wanted to get down to Saga and Crown Shy. I think what they’re doing in their kitchen right now is just really exciting stuff. It’s a company that knows how to promote and uplift and support their talent and their creatives. I look up to them and what they’re doing.

I really want to get to Community Kitchen around the corner; Mark Bittman and Mavis-Jay Sanders’ project where they’re pilot testing a sliding scale tasting menu concept, because in this neighborhood, it feels like a very near and dear concept. And I really love Mavis-Jay as a chef, she’s so cool.

I think that if you forget that food is about being present with people and building meaningful relationships, you lose an important, soul component of this work. I believe that feeding the people that are in front of you, being in dialog with them through food and treating them to the things that make them feel their experience, their day, their week, has significance. That is the power of food. We have this ability to create moments of significance with people, and connect people to something that feels human and eternal and alive. It gets harder and harder these days to find those moments, but I think that food is always one of those eternal connectors.

Honestly, it's candy. I love candy—I’m a candy obsessive. I took a summer to learn how to make it—I’m just so intrigued by candy. And that’s what I want when I’m on the couch. I love Bon Bon, I’m a Bon Bon fanatic, getting Swedish candy in bulk by the pound, sour gummies.