I’ve never been mad at a crab cake, but I’ve been disappointed in a few.
Other foods are other people’s problem. Pizza? Sure, some pies are better than others, but I’ll take two slices either way. Bagels? My taste buds are unfit to judge. I even find joy in both eastern and western style North Carolina barbecue.
A bad crab cake, though, can sink my spirit. It’s born with such promise! To be conceived as a crab cake is like starting life in a corvette shop, and when it emerges as a hooptie, it pains me.
In all my years of living in North Carolina, after a childhood growing up in Maryland on the Chesapeake, I can still count on one hand the places that deliver on the promise of a true Maryland style crab cake.
So this past summer, when folks started sending me messages about a new place up in Lincoln County, Poppy’s: A Taste of Maryland, I winced and waited. Then, when a loyal Charlotte Optimist reader took over marketing for the place and invited me up, I told her I would, but didn’t commit.
The last thing I want when I bite into a promising crab cake is an audience. I need space, preferably a few miles from the cook and anyone related to her. Disappointment is too sharp a sword.
This past holiday season, though, my family and I were up in Denver visiting family, and we stopped by Poppy’s on the way back to Charlotte. I spoke very few words in the takeout restaurant and wore my hat down low, just in case the owner noticed me and started rolling out the Old Bay carpet.
A short drive later, I sat down at my dining room table and opened a beauty of an eight-ounce seafood softball. I stabbed it with a fork and watched the lump crab meat tumble off like melting glaciers, and after one bite I muttered the word my father would say whenever he found joy: hotchupretty!
Whoever made this crab cake was raised right.
A few weeks later, Rebecca Tapper greeted me at the Poppy’s door with a classic Baltimore accent, one can cut you and hug you at the same time, much like that city itself.
The first thing she did was show me a TikTok video a food influencer had posted about the place, which sent sales soaring on the first weekend in January. She’d sold out of everything, she told me, which was bittersweet for a six-month-old business: “It was a great problem,” she said, “but I just wasn’t ready for it.”
She opened Poppy’s last June on N.C. Highway 16 Business in Denver, right next to a Dunkin’ Donuts, as a tribute to her father. Multiple businesses operate out of the carry-out kitchen, including a food prep operation and a farm-to-table burger shop that opened in late December.
They all share a shoebox of a kitchen, where it’d be difficult to tell where one business starts and the other stops, if not for the scents. Tapper had two soups on burners about an hour before the shop opened.
To read Poppy’s entree menu out loud is like repeating that one Forrest Gump scene with a Maryland twist: small crab cake, medium crab cake, large crab cake, crab cake sliders, cream of crab soup, Maryland crab soup, crab dip, cooked crab balls, take-and-broil crab mix buckets.
Tapper added a few items for kids — pigs in a blanket, and chicken sandwiches — and a chocolate banana bread for dessert. Otherwise, the ornery crustacean of my childhood is the star.
“I try to stay as humble as possible but I know the five things I have are good,” Tapper told me, and immediately I flew back in time and place, to a world of people without pretense.
My father, as I’ve mentioned before, was a Chesapeake Bay waterman. His family had an old cottage along one of the rivers that dumped into the Bay, and we spent our summers reeling in blue crabs on strings attached to chicken necks, then swooping under them with a net. On Fourth of July, we’d pick steamed crabs and watch my dad and uncles shoot off homemade fireworks from the dock.
Longtime readers may be zoning out by now: Here goes Michael, back on his crab cake horse. I gushed six years ago about another Charlotte crab cake haven, Lulu’s in west Charlotte. (I ate there on Thursday and it’s still terrific.) But if you think of it another way: six years is a long time to find another hole worth honoring.
Hotchupretty.
Tapper’s first business idea after moving to North Carolina was to open a pet cemetery.
This was in the summer of 2024. Tapper’s parents retired to Denver from Carroll County, Maryland, near Baltimore, in 2021. They found a 55-and-up community called Trilogy that fit them — “it’s a cruise ship without the water,” Rebecca says.
Rebecca’s father, Jeff, lived with a heart condition. So she decided, at 44 years old, to move down to help take care of him.
She had two kids, a 16-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy. She’d owned a home-organization business in Maryland and figured she’d continue that here. “But the market here is saturated,” she says.
Her father’s health deteriorated just before she moved; he died days before she could make it.
She spent the next several months helping her mom around the house, before beginning to think about how to support her family. Her marriage was struggling, too, amid all the other things, and she and her husband are now going through a divorce.
She’d had a dog in Maryland and remembered how grateful she was to have a pet cemetery that buried the pup after it died. She looked around the Charlotte area and didn’t see much competition in that, well, market.
“I thought I could buy a plot of land and make it beautiful,” she says. “But then it was just depressing to me.”
So she asked herself how she could fill a need in the Charlotte area, while also honoring her father. “Well, there’s no good crab cakes here,” she said.
Rebecca’s daughter, Shayna, is now 17 and works at Poppy’s most days. Rebecca’s mother, Barbara, works there for free. Shayna calls Barbara “Minny” to this day, after being unable to say “Grammy” as a toddler.
Three generations of Maryland-raised women, making top-shelf crab cakes here near Lake Norman.
The recipe is simple yet difficult to replicate: crab meat, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, crackers, eggs, and, of course, Old Bay. The crab meat is costly, so she measures it. Everything else is measured in heaps and care.
She makes about 12 pounds at a time, to maintain freshness.
Naturally, our conversation veered to the religion of Old Bay. I asked her if she’d ever put too much Old Bay on anything, and she looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “Um, no.”
I asked photographer Logan Cyrus, who’s from Ohio and has a shellfish allergy, if he was bored listening to us talk, and Rebecca jumped in. “Look,” she said, “we don’t have a lot to be proud of. But we’re proud of this.”
(Several times over the rest of our visit and lunch, Minny looked at Logan with the most sincere sad eyes and said, “I’m so sorry you can’t eat shellfish,” as if she wanted to start a GoFundMe for him.)
If you visit, you might see the prices and think she’s extra proud of hers. She sells small crab cakes for $12 apiece, medium for $22, and large for $35.
But considering she pays about $38 for a pound for crab meat — and each pound makes roughly two large crab cakes — “I’m not getting rich,” she says. That’s also the reason she has no desire to turn Poppy’s into anything more than a takeout spot. Seafood restaurants in an inland city like Charlotte are a tough business, given the price of product. Still, she’s innovated. Recently she’s been working on a crabby mac because customers ask for it. And she sells buckets of her crab cake mix for people to take home.
It’s all part of spreading the crab cake word, she says, in hopes that North Carolinians stop settling for less.
“I don’t want to naysay other people’s food — like, I don’t want to be mean,” she says. “I just don’t want them to think they’ve had the best until they’ve tried this. I don’t want them to think they’ve had a Maryland style crab cake until they’ve actually had a Maryland style crab cake. A Maryland style crab cake does not have vegetables. … I don’t know how to nicely say that.”
I thought that was pretty nice.
I brought home a take-and-broil crab cake for my brother, who spent many more years in Maryland than I did, before he moved to Charlotte in 2018. He cooked it up that night and texted: “Not going to lie. I’ve eaten over 500 crab cakes in my life. Living in Baltimore near 50 restaurants that served them spoiled me. This one is in the top 20 or so. Insanely good.”
