HAGS

"HAGS, which opened last summer in the East Village, is an experiment in queering fine dining, and not subtly: the restaurant’s tagline is “by Queer people for all people.” The owners are a queer couple—Camille Lindsley, the sommelier, and Telly Justice, the executive chef, restaurant veterans who worked, respectively, at Aldo Sohm Wine Bar and at Wildair and Contra. The majority of their staff identify as queer. Every table in the tiny, high-design dining room is set with a bowl of pins printed with pronouns; the bathroom features a fun-house mirror meant as commentary on the experience of dysmorphia, and an apothecary jar filled with fentanyl test strips. Determining whether the experiment succeeds is, of course, a matter of perspective, mine being that of a cis hetero white woman. I imagine, and I hope, that Justice, a trans woman, who has said that she’s never felt completely comfortable in a restaurant kitchen, has created a working environment that corrects for that. The front-of-house staff, led by Lindsley, is emphatically warm and welcoming. The possibilities for exploring queerness through food are rich. One of the unifying principles of MeMe’s, a now closed queer diner in Crown Heights, was camp, which resulted in some incredibly creative and wonderful comfort food. At HAGS, the menu, offered as a three- or five-course tasting, leans cerebral. My meal there last September began with a delicious Homo Hand Salad: a painstaking arrangement of crunchy, salted leaves of crimson endive, to be dipped in a creamy, pale-pink breakfast-radish vinaigrette seasoned with pickled quince, rose water, lime zest, hibiscus, and umeboshi. I was similarly impressed by a ripe, sweet end-of-season beefsteak tomato, blanketed in a glossy green fava emulsion, drizzled in sesame oil, and topped with gooseberries, perilla and shiso leaves, and sesame seeds. The salad and the tomato dish both happened to be vegan. Inasmuch as you can define queer cuisine, veganism plays a role, at least in part as a rejection of the status quo. A queer friend of mine put it more bluntly: “Queer people are obsessed with zoodles.” Indeed, there were zoodles (spiralized zucchini) on HAGS’s September menu, though they were made from avocado squash and were not vegan, topped with lump crab and Urfa-chili-marinated stracciatella cheese. That composition worked beautifully. I can’t say the same about a dish I tried more recently, which somehow managed to convey the limits of veganism while incorporating both meat and dairy—roasted Hasselback rutabaga, topped with a confusing mix of beer cheese, collard chips, house-made Worcestershire sauce, pancetta, and dates. There were also plenty of fine-dining tropes, such as a “carrot Pringles” amuse-bouche, tortured to the point of parody: caramelized carrot juice was mixed with carrot tea and pulverized Carolina rice, for a dough that was dehydrated, deep-fried, dusted with caramelized carrot powder, and finished with pearls of carrot-tofu crema. (Should you prefer to make this yourself, all HAGS recipes are available online, as part of the restaurant’s stand against gatekeeping.) The most radical meal I had at HAGS was on a Sunday, the night they offer a special “pay what you can” menu, “on a sliding scale, which includes free.” Subs—meatballs, Sunday gravy, and mozzarella on one, soft tofu, oregano vegan mayo, and fennel salad on the other—were served in cardboard boxes. Ice-cream sandwiches were made with vegan chocolate-chip cookies and beet ice cream. Glasses of wine from an array of open bottles on the bar were a flat nineteen dollars. The vibe was relaxed and convivial. It wasn’t fancy, but it was more than fine. (Tasting menu $85-$145.)" - Hannah Goldfield