HAGS

I've been wondering too. I hope we find out what finally happened.

You have to admit it was a great grift.

It has not.

HAGS posted on their Instagram Chef Telly Justice making soup for a World AIDS day event in Greenwich Village yesterday evening.

Telly lost many of his also straight male friends to AIDS, I guess. Good for him, meanwhile his employees are out of a job but at least they got to work at the all queer restaurant for 2 months.

HAGS is reopening December 30

Will someone be reporting from the re-opening? I have to say I love watching this shit show from the comfort of my home office not in NYC.

I had reservations cancelled due to their closing. I plan to try again after New Year's and I'll report back.

^ This is almost as exciting as when our undercover spy was planning a trip to Michfest. Don't wuss out, you fat whore!

Yes! I remember you had a rez R7, please go and report back!

I will R7, my reservation confirmed for January.

Oh, the anticipation. You'd think R7 had a reservation to French Laundry.

Do make sure the Narcan is still in stock in the bathrooms!

Also: sort through the pronoun pins at the host station and loudly huff that YOUR pronouns aren't included.

Please be careful R10! Maybe bring some mace and wear a disguise. I worry our Telly may read this thread and since HAGS only seats three, he can figure out who you are. He and his grace look like they throw some heft into their vicious face slappings.

R11 I honestly think sometimes that dl'ers would rather go to a "tasteful friends" open house than a sold out Broadway show. We have better taste than the average man, we enojoy esoteric things.

Should be Gags.

Here is HAGS post on Instagram announcing its re-opening and their feelings when they had to shut down earlier this fall.

I really hope they were shamed into opening back up. They found some unhirable kooks and promised them jobs and then fucking folded immediately. I am so excited to read our intrepid diner's review of this later.

Any updates on this place?

Got a peek at the HAGS tasting menu:

Crudx of Scottish salmyn

Clam chowder with chorizo

Duet of boeuf—rare pink curtains, frankfurter in natural casing

Apple pangender dowdy

Primetime has been lifted! I went to HAGS in early January and I actually liked it. It is pricey and I spent too much, but I was aware of that coming in. Menu is now picking either 3 or 5 options. I went with the 5 with wine pairings. The food was delicious. There is a vegan bent to the offerings ,but they have meat as well. The wine pairings were well selected. I also received a complementary starter with a wine pairing. The service was friendly and knowledgeable. I met Camille who is quite engaging and briefly Telly, who was busy preparing the orders. I sat at the bar. I came alone, but got to chatting with a woman also alone at the bar and she was a good conversationalist. I had a great night out. If HAGS is a scam they are doing a good job putting over the scam.

So happy to say that HAGS did not play out like a rabid TRA activist on Twitter. Good food, nice people. The price point is very high so not a place I'd go to regularly but once or twice a year, absolutely. I wish them the best.

R19 Are you not a paying member here but you had no qualms about going to Hags and dropping 2 bills? You're adorable!

Apparently Hags is doing well. Shove it, bitchez!

R20, you think paying members always sign their posts? YOU'RE the adorable one!

Do they still do the Sunday cheap meal? I wish you could go again R19 on the Sunday ones.

What's queer-forward about them? Are they all sashay shante and shit? Do they think being queer-forward is new in the East Village? I don't care what these fuckers do, but they need to quite acting like they invented being gay. For fuck's sake!

Objectively petty threads like this make me happy to log into DL.

The Resy Pride roundup salutes our favorite gender nonconforming prix fixe experience:

“The mirror in the bathroom was specifically designed so trans folks don’t feel dysphoric. There are complimentary fentanyl test strips and Narcan in the bathroom.”

MARY! Or, MYRON!

[quote]“So many dishes on the menu have sprung out of a collaborative effort. I feel like the inherently queer part and parcel of it is us being totally willing and down to kill our darlings. So, so many, very classical fine dining places don’t allow themselves to indulge in such caprices,” says Justice.

Double, triple, quadruple MARY!

Queer—it means anything!

I don't want to derail this delicious thread, but I am stopped in my tracks to learn from R26 that A) some trans folx feel dysphoric if they look in a mirror and most especially B) there is a way to design a mirror that can reaffirm both masculinity OR femininity, depending on what the viewer needs.

It's almost worth going there to just to see this magical mirror, mirror on the wall.

And to safely overdose.

R15 The poor babies! Who knew keeping a restaurant going in New York was difficult????

In the absence of HAGS news, hypersexual West Coast competitor [italic]Hi Felicia[/italic] has begun transitioning to "sleek-and-sexy wine bar."

[quote]It was hailed as a culturally momentous, radically inclusive restaurant run by a young Black queer woman determined to upend the norms of fine dining. When Parker Kim heard about Hi Felicia in Oakland, they knew they wanted to work there.

[quote]A young transgender cook of color, Kim said Hi Felicia, which opened at 326 23rd St. last April, was the first restaurant where they didn’t feel tokenized or othered. They saw their own dreams in Hi Felicia’s 26-year-old owner, Imana, who uses just her first name. The staff, almost entirely people of color and many queer-identifying, wore crop tops and blasted music while serving a $195 tasting menu to diners clamoring to experience Imana’s much-celebrated vision of “vulgar” fine dining.

[....]

[quote]Imana has become a very public — and somewhat polarizing — figure in the Bay Area dining industry, known for sharing vulnerable Instagram posts about her mental health next to videos of scantily clad pole dancers performing at Sluts, her San Francisco wine bar. She drew attention last year when she left a San Francisco restaurant without paying her bill, later saying it was an accident. Seven Bay Area restaurants and bars have decided to ban her, owners and employees confirmed to The Chronicle. When asked about false rumors circulating that she had staged the burglary of Hi Felicia herself, she told The Chronicle: “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t just do a break-in. I would have actually committed arson.”

[....]

[quote]Dawn said Imana made frequent comments about their body, genitals and her attraction to them. (Imana denied commenting on their genitalia.) Imana grabbed their butt at work multiple times, Dawn said. Dawn said they would either tell Imana to stop or ignore the behavior. Quin Kirwan, Hi Felicia’s former general manager, confirmed Dawn reported the alleged behavior at the time.

[quote]Imana said Hi Felicia employees never told her that she made them feel uncomfortable, nor did she receive any complaints about alleged sexual harassment and no complaints with government agencies are known to have been filed. She said she touched some employees, but some employees also touched her and made comments about her body. She never thought it crossed a line: “There was consent because we were all best friends.”

[quote]“Any way you slice it there was an insane amount of inappropriateness, and it was the allure to dining at Hi Felicia,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “It was vulgar fine dining.”

[....]

[quote]Nine former staffers said they felt Imana created a hyper-sexual work environment. Parker Story, Hi Felicia’s former wine director, said Imana once arrived shortly before the restaurant opened and announced to staff that she had been masturbating for several hours.

[quote]The culture at Hi Felicia was “super sexual,” Imana acknowledged, without the typical separation between boss and employee. She knew about employees’ sex lives and they knew about hers, she said. She said some workers saw her naked, and vice versa. But she said she doesn’t feel solely responsible for cultivating that environment.

[quote]“How could I alone create that? The team and I built the restaurant together,” she said.

[....]

[quote]The line between personal and professional relationships in her pop-up was murky from the start, Imana acknowledged. Her home was her employees’ workplace. They would go out drinking together after serving rabbit mole to diners sitting at mismatched tables covered with bed sheets from Goodwill, said Kirwan, who started the supper club with Imana.

[quote]At one point, the cost to dine at the apartment was $225 per person, which bought a seven-course tasting menu with dishes like cashew queso and lamb enchiladas. But the supper club regularly served basic grocery store ingredients, including precooked rotisserie chickens, tortilla chips and pre-chopped vegetables, according to Kirwan and Dawn.

“Vulgar fine dining” makes it sound as if the staff doesn’t wash their hands. Pass.