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Fine dining doesn’t usually come with a sliding scale. At HAGS, that’s kind of the point.
The acclaimed Lower East Side restaurant, run by James Beard-nominated chef Telly Justice and wine director Camille Lindsley, is expanding its pay-what-you-can model beyond brunch with a new dinner series kicking off this spring. The idea is simple but still pretty radical in a city where tasting menus can easily climb into triple digits: guests pay what they can, not what the menu dictates.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because HAGS has already been quietly testing the concept. Its pay-what-you-can weekend brunch has become a cornerstone of the restaurant’s identity, offering the same high-touch cooking as its standard service but in a format that opens the door to a much wider range of diners. Now, the team is taking that philosophy into the evening—and on the road.
The new dinner series builds on a string of past collaborations with restaurants like Post Haste in Philadelphia, Acamaya in New Orleans and Counter in Charlotte, where HAGS has already experimented with accessible, creative pop-ups. The next phase formalizes the concept into a national series, with events at both HAGS and partner restaurants around the U.S.
Some dinners will bring visiting chefs into the HAGS kitchen for one-night-only collaborations, while others will flip the script, with the HAGS team traveling to cook alongside partners in their own spaces. Each event will feature a jointly created menu served entirely on a pay-what-you-can basis—no prix fixe, no minimum, just an open-ended invitation to participate.
The spring lineup is already taking shape: HAGS will collaborate with Madeira Park in Atlanta on March 30, followed by Joodooboo in Oakland on May 19. On June 1, the restaurant will host Delicious & Harmless for a pop-up dinner back in New York. More partners will be announced soon.
The concept behind HAGS is a model that’s exceedingly rare in fine dining. The hope of the series is that by working with other chefs and kitchens, the pay-what-you-can format can prove itself in different contexts, not just as a one-off idea but as something that can actually scale. Or, at the very least, spark a few more conversations about who gets to sit at the table—and how.