In this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, I’m joined by Telly Justice, executive chef and co-owner of HAGS, one of the most exciting restaurants to come out of New York in the last few years. She shares her Five Rules for Building Trust with your Restaurant & Brand, not through hype, but through how you show up every day. Telly talks about the importance of knowing yourself, being consistent, striving for equitability, communicating early and often, and enthusiastically accepting accountability. She breaks down how those ideas move from a mission statement to the dining room, the kitchen, and the community that forms around the work.
This one resonates because it is a reminder that the real flex is reliability. Showing up for yourself, your work, and your team with intention and purpose is not a slogan, it is a practice. When you respect the people who support your projects, your staff, your guests, your regulars, the quiet tables, the loud ones, you build something that can actually hold weight. Everything is connected. The culture in the kitchen shows up in the dining room. The consistency on a Tuesday shows up in the trust on a Saturday. It all works as one ecosystem, and when you take responsibility for your part in it, the whole thing gets stronger.
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.
I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.
Today, I am joined by Telly Justice, the executive chef and co-owner of one of the most exciting restaurants to come out of New York in the last few years, Hags. She’s here to share her five rules for building trust with your restaurant and brand. We talk about the importance of consistency, that good communication allows for everyone to have a seat at the table, and that by practicing self-accountability lets you keep showing up for your team. It’s a great conversation from one of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs of 2025 and an inspiring conversation for anyone who’s looking to build a better relationship with their staff, diners, or their restaurant at large. So let’s get into the rules.
Telly, it is so nice to meet you. I know you’ve been having a very busy January, so I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and chat with me.
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be talking with you. I’m a big fan. This podcast is awesome.
Oh, I really appreciate that. And I’m a huge fan of Hags, your restaurant. It’s been such an amazing thing to see come together and the community that you’ve created both in and around the restaurant. How early into the concept did you start thinking about the relationship you wanted to have with your customers at Hags?
Our vision for our relationship with customers predated our decision to open the brick and mortar, especially as initially a pop-up concept that was born in 2020 during the pandemic. We really wanted to get out there and do what we did just to make people feel a sense of community and a sense of care and joy. We knew that we had this talent and this skill, and we wanted to share it with people. We didn’t expect it to turn into what we’ve built over time. We didn’t expect to open a brick and mortar so quickly. Yeah, it came from this place of caring about people first, and that was essential to when we built hags the brick and mortar being able to be guided by a clear mission statement that isn’t necessarily exactly the food you want to cook or the spot you’re going to open I think does lead to this authenticity and this success your mission statement is by queer people for all people yes why was it so important to you to position hags in this way
Speaking to the queer people component, the first part of that sentence, we knew that that was going to be the larger food world’s vision of us. And we wanted to own that first and foremost. We wanted to say that part of ourselves out loud and show that we were proud of it and that that was a place of authenticity for us to operate from and a crucial aspect of building our community. But we also wanted to, following up with the second half of that sentence, we wanted to make sure that everybody felt invited and encouraged and a part of what we were building. And we didn’t see it as an exclusively queer project, but we did want to see ourselves as whole and equal in the exchange as queer people doing the work. So that whole sentence really communicates what we were about when we were building the pop-up and what we continue to be about today.
You’ve successfully been able to communicate what you’re about, both by what you stand for and the food you cook. So much so that Food & Wine named you one of the best new chefs of 2025. And not that outside acknowledgement is everything, but it is nice every once in a while to receive such an accolade. How did you feel hearing the news and what has it meant to you as a chef and restaurant owner and as a person?
won’t lie i’ve been cooking in this industry professionally for almost 20 years now and amazing when you event that kind of time in these kitchens especially high-end fine dining you can’t help but have that dream that goal i want to awards i want to see myself in that magazine so many of my heroes walked that path and they gave me this thing to look out towards they gave me this goal to look to as a I was clawing my way through these kitchens. It’s hard work and you have to have something to dream about. You have to have something to believe in. When I left the fine dining world behind at the peak of the pandemic to do this pop-up, I kind of forgot all of that. I left it behind in a lot of ways. My goals changed and my priorities changed. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to access with Hags, a restaurant in New York City, became very different from the goals that I had as a young cook. And we were able to achieve a lot of our goals in building meaningful community and feeding some really great people that I love showing up and feeding every day in our dining room.
When we found out that I was receiving this accolade from food and wine, it was totally out of left field because we just hadn’t thought about it. It wasn’t something that we were actively pursuing. We were pursuing other things. of course it took a moment of recalibrating what this means to me and what it means to me now that i have this deeply personal restaurant not for nothing hags is a business and it’s been an incredible boon to our business it’s brought a lot of people and a lot of attention our way i would say mostly if not exclusively very positive i love that i love that for the cooks in the kitchen they feel their work is meaningful it’s special they see people out in the dining room getting more and more excited about the project i love that for them i still feel like A regular old chef just cooking it out every day. I don’t think it’s changed how I feel about my practice of cooking much, but I do love to see the effects. It’s really cool.
Seeing those effects and seeing the dining room full every night is such a fantastic thing to have created and been a part of, and something that takes effort every day which is why I’m so excited for you to be sharing your five rules for building trust with your restaurant and brand stepping away from the fine dining world can be scary especially with all of its guardrails because of those strict confinements it doesn’t always allow you to explore who you really are which could ultimately hinder you from finding your real success which is a big part of your rule number one
Rule number one for me is know yourself. Self-knowledge is so incredibly crucial to any personal project, but also be curious about others. It is really hard when you’re struggling to access that self-knowledge to be truly available to your curiosities about where other people are coming from. Starting with who am I? What do I bring to the table? What kind of food do I want to cook? What kind of restaurant do I want to run? How do I want my guests to feel in my space? That’s so essential. It can’t be something you adopt or inherit from a job that you’ve worked or another restaurant that you’ve come from. You have to think critically about what these things mean to you and how you’re going to build a personal space that represents you and communicates your values, your vision, your ethos. And when you do that, you create so much space for other people to be themselves, which is so lovely when you’re curious about where they’re coming from.
When our diners come in, we love to ask them more than just how their experience or how the food is, but how was your day? That’s amazing. Where are you coming from? Where are you going? What are you about? What are your interests? What drew you to our space? And by the end of the meal, I find we have more than just diners. We have new friends. We have new neighbors. We have new community members. And that develops such a level of community loyalty, community trust, and a deeper understanding than I think you see at most restaurants. And that’s one of the beautiful things that I get to experience in this space.
Having people return, not just guests, but those who work with you and the world at large to your restaurant, to what you’re doing, is such a beautiful thing. But it also comes with a big responsibility of creating the same experience or creating a baseline that people can expect whenever they walk through your doors or sit down with you, which leads into your rule number two.
Number two is be very consistent. This is an important follow-up to knowing yourself. It can be really easy to perform what you think you ought to be doing. Yes. But if you know yourself and you know how you cook, if you know how you serve, then when a guest comes in a second, a third, a fourth time, you don’t have to try to meet their expectations. They already know what to expect. They’re expecting you. So be consistent with how you’re showing. If you showed them warmth and curiosity the first time, return that warmth, that curiosity the second time, the third time. And if you continue to just show up exactly how you are, exactly how you do things with deep consistency, then you build something of a foundation that is closer to a relationship than a transaction. And people trust that deeply. They start to get to know the staff’s name. They start to see the interesting highlights on the menu that even if it’s seasonal and it’s changing constantly, they see your personality, they see your tastes. And that draws them deeper into the project that you’ve built. So consistency is huge for building trust.
Being one of the people who helped create Hags and being named one of the best new chefs, it’d be very easy for you to say, it’s about me. I’m the face. This is my show. Even if it’s just outward facing for PR reasons and make the story very easy to tell. Yeah. But that approach usually leads to short-term personal gains, but not long-term growth. How you allow for the sustainability of success makes up your rule number three.
Rule number three is strive for equitability. What this means to me is in any kitchen, in any front of house service facing dynamic, there are always going to be loud voices. I’m a loud voice. I take up a lot of space. There are a lot of people that are quick to express their opinions, that are quick to be the mouthpiece. I’m guilty of that. But I think that especially as a leader, you have to be able to survey the room and see who’s the quiet one, whose voice isn’t being heard. How do I get close to them and in good faith source their voice, their opinion? How do I build them up? How do I put a pedestal under every individual so that everybody succeeds as we succeed in the restaurants? And we do that with the diners as well. We want to make sure that the shy person at the corner table is getting the same kind of warmth and hospitality that the folks that come in ready to party and throw down with us are getting. That levels the playing field. It makes them level with me in as many ways as I can share. There are always important creative ways to like dig deeper into that equitability project. Speaking to it and always showing up in every dynamic, looking for that person that is getting less, that is slightly quieter, that is being heard less is so essential in creating a trusting environment and a trusting culture.
Being able to differ differentiate the different type of approach and talking to people is really tough as a leader. Knowing how one person’s going to respond or even a stranger who’s walking for the first time takes a lot of practice and it takes a lot of effort, especially if you want to be able to keep things moving along and keep the open channels of conversation going, which makes up your rule number four.
Rule number four is communicate early and often. There are always going to be issues. There are always going to be problems, surprises. Chaos is inherent to our world. All the time. Especially we find it deeply embedded in restaurant work. It’s really important, especially from a leadership perspective, but really at any point in the hierarchy to communicate issues, communicate concerns, communicate advice and do it early and do it frequently. As much as you can be talking to one another about what to expect, what to react to, own that honestly, especially this is leading into rule number five. But when you’re the source of the chaos, when you’re the source of the issue, it’s really important to be like, hey, by the way, I just broke a tray of glasses. It’s going to impact things for you, for me, for the diners. We got to talk about it. And I’m not going to shy away from that conversation. It’s really, really important to recognize when there’s something important to communicate, doing it quickly and doing it as much as necessary for that information to land and be absorbed into the dynamic.
Knowing that you yourself can be the chaos, which ties back to rule number one, is just as important as everything else of being consistent and striving for equability and communicating. And your fifth and final rule really ties it all together. Because there are days where you have to recognize you are the leader, you are the loudest, you are taking up the most space, and that sometimes things are going to go wrong. Yeah. What’s your rule number five?
Rule number five is enthusiastically accept accountability. Talk about it. Not just begrudgingly, which I think we all have these moments in our lives where we mess up. Yeah. We’re the problem. Mm-hmm. It can really sting to be like, yeah, I did that. I’m sorry. I think if you show up to those moments and you’re enthusiastic about saying, I really messed up. I really wish I hadn’t done this thing. I really wish that I hadn’t served you this dish cold. I recognize that I failed you and your expectations in this situation. And... I’m really sorry. Centering the person that feels slighted or is disadvantaged by your actions, hearing them out, give them space, give them a little time to offer you that accountability and receive it. It’s so important. The more you do it and the more practiced you are at receiving that accountability for your actions, the easier it is, the less scary it is. It never stings as much as you think it will. The more you do it, the more people trust you to be open and honest and earnest with their feedback. And then it stings even less. It feels like an essential part of building a meaningful relationship. That’s where trust lives. Even though it’s the fifth rule, it’s probably the most important one. You don’t need to know yourself to accept accountability. You just need to know that we all mess up. We all make mistakes. We all have to sit with it every once in a while.
What a beautiful sentiment to end on. Telly, congratulations on everything. If people want to see what Hags is up to, make a reservation, see what you’re cooking, where can they go?
Please check us out on Instagram. We’re at Hags underscore NYC. Also, we have a really ugly website, HagsNYC.com. Check it out. Our dog, Tootie, who is the restaurant’s mascot, is on there. You’ll see a great picture of him. and come to us in the east village we’re at first ave and 10th street we’re open wednesday through friday for dinner and on sundays we do a really awesome brunch 11 a.m to 3 p.m it’s pay whatever you want fully sliding scale it’s a lot of fun i love it come by
Well, next time i’m in the city i’ll be coming in for a little chaos and fun right telly thanks again great to see you thank you so much such a pleasure
