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Troy Guard’s HashTAG offers chef-driven breakfast and brunchTroy Guard’s HashTAG offers chef-driven breakfast and brunch

With a third location opening this year and more in 2025, it’s a growth vehicle for his restaurant group.

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

February 7, 2024

4 Min Read
Mimosa Flight CREDIT TAG Restaurant Group
The TAG Restaurant Group has found that Mimosas and other cocktails sell well in the morning.TAG Restaurant Group

A number of chains have sprung up offering only breakfast, brunch, and lunch. They provide operators and their employees with reasonable work hours and menu items with moderate-to-low food costs. Customers, meanwhile, get to enjoy less expensive meals in casual settings, and they have come to understand that alcohol’s not just for dinner anymore. Mimosas and Bloody Marys have long been staples of weekend brunch, but now that so many people are working from home, a weekday morning cocktail or two is no longer out of the question.

One of the beneficiaries of these changes of habit is HashTAG, a growth vehicle of Troy Guard’s TAG Restaurant Group in Denver.

Guard himself has a fine-dining background, having grown up in Hawaii and come under the tutelage of chef and restaurateur Roy Yamaguchi. He went on to work under Richard Sandoval, which brought him to Denver, where he ultimately built his own restaurant group, including the steakhouse concept Guard and Grace, fast-casual Bubu, and casual-dining Mexican concept Los Chingones.

The first HashTAG opened in summer of 2017 in the newish Central Park neighborhood, which was developed on the site of the former Stapleton International Airport.

“I wanted it to be fun, obviously, with a great vibe, but more on the savory side than the sweet side,” Guard said. “I tend to cook food that I like to eat, and I can’t do sweet like I used to.”

Business was middling for the first couple of years.

“I misjudged the neighborhood, because I live here,” Guard said, adding that he wanted a cool breakfast spot for himself and his friends.

“But as the neighborhood grew, the place just kept growing — plus great reviews etc.,” he said.

HashTAG_Downtown_Rendering_Rooftop_ViewHashTAg_Downtown_Rendering_1__CREDIT_Rowe_Creative_Union.jpeg

Hashtag’s third location is slated to open in downtown Denver in June.

As with most operators, Guard reassessed his business in the wake of the pandemic. He closed his former fine-dining flagship, TAG in Denver’s Larimer Square, to focus on concepts with more growth potential, including HashTAG.

The second location of the breakfast and brunch concept opened in the suburb Highlands Ranch, Colo., in October 2023, and a third is slated to open in downtown Denver in June. A lease for the fourth location has been signed and is slated to open in early 2025, “and we’re working on five and six right now,” Guard said.

The name, suggested by a friend of Guard’s who now gets to eat there for free, comes from the social media concept, of course, but also refers to the restaurant group and the restaurant’s signature breakfast hash with potatoes, vegetables, choice of breakfast meat, and eggs, as well as its more popular pork hash with hash browns, adobo pork shoulder, ranchero sauce, roasted Anaheim chiles, grilled onions, cotija cheese and spicy coleslaw.

That pork shoulder is reprised in a Colorado-style green chili omelet, a breakfast burrito that is the restaurant’s top seller, one of several variations on eggs Benedict, and as a side dish.

The all-scratch kitchen also offers huevos rancheros, chilaquiles, omelets, biscuits and gravy, chicken & waffles, and sweet items too, including a sea salt chocolate chip hotcake and a caramel apple hotcake, plus bread pudding-style French toast and more.

In the fall and winter, Guard also uses roast chicken bones to make a chicken pho with a poached egg and rice noodles that’s served at HashTAG.

He said the average per-person check at the concept is around $22-$24.

HashTAG_Interior CREDIT TAG Restaurant Group.jpg

Hashtag provides a festive environment for breakfast, brunch, and early cocktails.

As the concept grows, the chef is planning to enhance the menu and bring in more of his Hawaiian background, including loco moco — a hamburger patty in brown gravy over rice topped with an egg — made with trim from Guard and Grace, as well as spam, teriyaki steak, and the Portuguese malasada doughnuts that are popular on the islands.

He has also expanded business hours, closing at 4 p.m. instead of 2, which Guard said allows him to offer drinks to people slipping out of the office early.

“We’re coming up with some little savory, breakfast bite-sized appetizers too — pigs in a blanket, little sliders, French toast bites using Hawaiian bread, just some fun good stuff.”

Guard said the Highlands Ranch location has a cooler vibe than the Central Park one, “and we’re going to make it feel even better in the third one,” with a 4,000 square foot outdoor patio that will allow him to host events featuring his other concepts.

“Hopefully everybody gets better with age, so we get better with each one we open,” he said.

Guard said he will continue to expand HashTAG in Denver, and then move on to Houston, where his second Guard and Grace restaurant is already thriving.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]

 

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About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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