How HAGS Built a Restaurant Designed to Repel the Wrong Guests | Telly Justice & Camille Lindsley
Michelin-awarded restaurateur Josh Kopel sits down with Telly Justice & Camille Lindsley on FULL COMP — the show where Josh Kopel unpacks the tactics, tools, and strategies of the world’s best restaurateurs.
Telly Justice and Camille Lindsley are the chef and the hospitality director behind HAGS, the explicitly queer tasting-menu restaurant in Manhattan, and their conversation with Josh is the clearest case study this show has run on building a brand that deliberately excludes people. They met in 2015 working at Kimball House in Decatur, Georgia — Justice in what was their first sous chef position, running a high-volume program with a satellite oyster shucking room, and Lindsley working the door as maitre d’, tracking 250 covers a night on a yellow legal pad because the restaurant took no reservations at all. That shared background in a genuinely difficult room is the foundation for almost every decision they later made in New York. The strategic center of the episode is the deliberate narrowness of the concept. Justice is direct about it: they named the restaurant HAGS knowing it would call to a specific kind of person and repel a certain kind of person, and that was entirely by design. Josh’s framing is that they planted flag after flag — the name, the explicitly queer identity, the prix fixe format — each one narrowing the addressable audience and deepening the loyalty of whoever remains. Their argument for why this works in New York specifically is that the city has both a necessity and an eagerness for niche concepts, and that a restaurant built by two people with weird niche interests is inevitably going to be an extension of those interests rather than a market study. The tasting menu decision has three separate justifications, which is what makes it durable rather than merely stylish: it reflects the fine-dining experience both of them actually came from, there was no explicitly queer space in the tasting-menu category at all, and the physical constraints of a very small dining room genuinely suit a fixed menu better than a la carte service. Constraint, identity, and experience all pointed the same direction. Lindsley’s contribution is a hospitality style built from scratch rather than borrowed, and Justice is emphatic that this is the harder half of the work — imbuing the spirit of what HAGS is into an actual service philosophy took a long road, and only recently does it feel definitively distinct from service at other restaurants in New York or anywhere else. The measure of success they name is not covers or press but the fact that a guest can look at a plate and identify it as a HAGS plate, taste it and find it unlike anything else in the neighborhood. There is also an unusually honest passage about what winning meant at the start. For Justice, as a queer and trans person, the goal of opening a fancy restaurant in Manhattan sounded so unattainable that success simply meant opening the doors at all — and they attribute many of the hallmark features of the brand to a deep naivety and brashness that came from believing it would never actually materialize. That is a useful reframe for any operator who over-plans their way out of a distinctive concept. The episode closes forward-looking: HAGS is moving to a larger space in the coming months, keeping the tasting menu and adding a chef’s counter while introducing a la carte service 7 days a week — the test of whether a brand this deliberately narrow can scale its room without widening its point of view.
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⏱ CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
03:02 Navigating the Restaurant Culture
05:59 The Journey to HAGS
09:03 Defining Success in the Restaurant World
12:01 Building a Unique Restaurant Culture
14:53 The Impact of Identity on Business
18:09 Adapting Business Models for Growth
21:01 Challenges of Scaling a Restaurant
26:23 The Magic of HAGS: Intentional Space and Evolution
30:52 Evolving Roles: From Managers to Restaurateurs
38:02 Balancing Personal Investment and Brand Identity
45:04 Building a Sustainable Team: Promoting from Within
50:06 The Special Sauce: What Makes HAGS Unique
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🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS
• They met working together at a restaurant called Kimball House.
• HAGS was born from a desire to change restaurant culture.
• Success for HAGS was simply opening the doors.
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ABOUT THE HOST
Josh Kopel is a Michelin-awarded restaurateur, founder of Restaurant Scaling
Systems, and the host of FULL COMP. After two decades operating restaurants —
from fast casual to fine dining — Josh Kopel now teaches independent restaurant
owners how to build profitable restaurants that run without them.
For free restaurant marketing tools and trainings from Josh Kopel, visit
https://joshkopel.com
▶ Subscribe for a new FULL COMP episode with Josh Kopel every day.
#restaurants #hospitality #restaurantbusiness #FullComp #JoshKopel
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