Jay Davis Settles in at LuLu’s Express, Creating a Tuckaseegee Staple

Jay Davis remembers moving from Baltimore to Charlotte in 2017 and finding one big weakness in the city.

“I saw a lot of opportunity in Charlotte, but I wasn’t a big fan of the food here,” Davis recalls.

Having worked as a bounty hunter in Baltimore, he started a bail bond business in Charlotte while continuing to search for the type of soul food he had grown to love in the DMV.

Eventually, he decided to be the change he wanted to see in the city, merging his entrepreneurial spirit with his passion for food by opening LuLu’s Restaurant, a Maryland-style chicken and seafood joint on Tuckaseegee Road with his then-wife in November 2019.

“Instead of being just a negative critic, I figured I would join in the fight and create my own concept,” he says.

As it turned out, there were plenty of folks like him who had been waiting patiently for someone to bring the flavors of the Chesapeake Bay to Charlotte. One of those people was local writer and Maryland native Michael Graff.

An editor with Charlotte Agenda at the time, Graff wrote a grateful review of the new west-side restaurant about a month after it opened. The headline read, “The best crab cake in Charlotte today, according to the son of a Chesapeake Bay waterman.”

Traffic picked up following the publication of that piece and it hasn’t slowed down since, says Davis. While the business has seen its ups and downs — Davis’ divorce and staffing shortages in 2022 led to the closure of LuLu’s second location in Plaza Midwood and his bar Hideaway — he stands strong on Tuckasegee, where LuLu’s (officially called LuLu’s Express since a rebranding in 2023) has become a community staple.

We caught up with Davis on a recent afternoon following a turkey giveaway he hosted for neighbors in Enderly Park and throughout Charlotte to talk about his journey at LuLu’s Express and recent menu updates.

Queen City Nerve: Were you familiar with the restaurant industry when you pursued this venture in the first place? Was that something that’s been in your family?

Jay Davis: I don’t have any [past] experience in the restaurant industry. I’m the only one. My cousin Jimmy and my uncle Kevin were the actual first [in my family] to own a restaurant in Baltimore. They did pretty well for a little while, then they got out of the business.

For me, it’s just more so something I love. Food is my passion. Every other business that I own is really for the business concept, but food is my passion.

So coming from Baltimore, where there’s a very specific food culture, crab cakes being the one dish that people think of the most, how easy was it for you to decide that that’s the angle you wanted to take?

My concept came so easy because it’s things that I missed from being at home. Seeing that Charlotte is a transient city, a lot of people that aren’t from here, I figured there’d be enough of a following or enough people from Baltimore or from Maryland, DC, Virginia, or even farther up north that would appreciate the concept because it’s stuff that we’re used to from up north.

In those first months before COVID turned everything on its head, what was the reception like in terms of folks wanting this? Did you hear a lot from transplants and other folks like, “Damn, I’ve been waiting for this type of menu?”

That’s what I still hear. When I brought it open and I created the concept, we were only slow for maybe the first 30 days. And then the article came out in December labeling us the best crab cakes in Charlotte and the rest was history after that, because then everybody knew we were there and things took off very quickly. There was a lot of love for the concept from its inception, honestly.

As a first-time restaurateur, you were only four months into it with things going well when COVID hit. That had to be a stressful time. Did you think it was all over for LuLu’s?

Actually, no. We never shut down. When they first were talking about COVID, we were, if not the first, one of the first to switch completely to curbside [service]. So once we switched to curbside, we were able to keep it flowing. And so actually, business got crazier as opposed to it slowing down. So we didn’t have a real slow down with COVID. If it did slow down, it was maybe a day or so, but it wasn’t enough to get anxiety about it.

And so for me, I’m a pretty solid person. I don’t fear things very easily, or I don’t get anxious very easily. So even though COVID was happening, it wasn’t a huge deal for me right off the gate. It was more so one of those, “Let’s figure out what the pivot is going to look like.” But there was no real fear attached to it.

And what are your other best sellers and most popular items that you find folks talking about the most beyond the crab cakes?

Besides the crab cakes, the crab fries are a big hit. Our stuffed salmon platter is a big hit. We get a lot of raves about our different chicken flavors, or our chicken as a whole, honestly. Then we have an item, we call it The Hookup, that’s our version of hibachi.

I noticed just this month you’ve added jerk lamb pasta. What other changes have you been making to the menu?

That’s been received really well. We also have rotisserie wings now, Cornish hen, and turkey wings … I’ve been looking for ways to reinvent the wheel but not deviate too far away from it, if that makes any sense.

What I want to do is, every so often, do a poll to figure out what people are looking for, what they’re missing. The turkey wings came up because people kept saying, “Hey, there’s nowhere that has good turkey wings anymore.” I said, “Well, I’m good at turkey wings. Let me do it.” And then those were received really well.

That’s what we do; we look to our client base, our customer base, and if I hear something so many times, I go,

“Okay, let me see what this market looks like,” and if it does well, we hold on to it. If it doesn’t do very well, we say, “Okay, well, maybe we could do this as a special, and maybe just do it for a day or two until it’s gone.”

So the jerk lamb pasta, will that be a permanent menu item then?

The jerk lamb pasta, the lamb chop platter, those are permanent menu items. The Cornish hen is going to be twice a week — let’s say a Sunday dinner item and maybe a Wednesday or something like that. That’s more of a meal for two; it’s a whole Cornish hen stuffed with three sides over a bed of rice. So you get yams, mac and cheese, greens. Again, that did really well.

The turkey wings, we’re going to go to be doing those every single day. That’s going to be a permanent menu item. The rotisserie wings are going to be a permanent menu item … We also did a smothered pork chop. It’s been received pretty well, and that’s probably going to become a permanent menu item as well.

You’re located on Tuckaseegee Road, right between Enderly Park and Wesley Heights. You’ve got the sure signs of gentrification creeping in all the time with craft beer and cider and seltzer spots right down the street. You’ve got Charlotte’s first Michelin-star restaurant now as a neighbor, which is great. Meanwhile, you cultivate an atmosphere that gives these authentic crab shack vibes; there’s an authenticity there. And from what I’ve seen during my visits over the years, there’s a mixed clientele of folks who may have lived in Enderly Park their whole lives eating alongside Wesley Heights residents who may live in some half-a-million-dollar home. What does it mean to you to be that community gathering hub there on Tuckaseegee in what has become a quickly changing neighborhood?

It’s interesting. When I first looked at Tuckaseegee, I didn’t actually realize the significance of it. I was really just looking at the location. My former mother-in-law mentioned looking at property in that area, but I didn’t understand the significance until I got over there. As our first location, we learned that it’s actually very significant as far as the neighborhood. The people in the area, they remember [our building] from being Hong Phat and from coming there when they were younger and growing up on the food. And so it’s become a staple. The location has become a staple.

Even the times that I considered moving or new locations before, if I mention it to some of the customer base, it’s an automatic: “Don’t leave Tuckaseegee.” So my main thing has been since then to figure out how to make it better and better and better to be able to serve the people in that community because it seems like, again, it’s such a staple, people want us there. So I definitely enjoy that.

But still, being able to maintain a concept like ours, more of the soul food, Maryland-style concept in that area, even with the signs of gentrification coming, I think we’re going to be there for a good long while.

I don’t want to say it’s become a pride thing to be there, but it does make you feel good when you hear how people of the neighborhood still react to coming in and getting the food, and even when I’m out and about having a good time, people recognize me from the location. It does maintain a level of pride in me to stay there.

You just hosted your Big Turkey Pull Up event, handing out more than 50 turkeys to folks in the community. How long have you been hosting Thanksgiving events like this?

I usually try to do something every year, but this is the first year we actually did it the way we did it. Normally, I just find different groups around Charlotte that can give me a family or something like that, and then we’ll just sponsor the family. So instead of doing it that way this year, we just did an actual turkey giveaway.

It’s definitely something I’ll do again because I like the way the turnout was. Some people really need help with getting stuff like that for Thanksgiving. So it was a good feeling, seeing them actually get the help they needed, especially at this time of year with everything that’s going on — it was a big plus, man.

You mentioned everything that’s going on; with SNAP benefits paused this month and grocery prices where they are, did it feel like this year was important for you to make your reach as wide as possible?

That’s absolutely what it was. Instead of, like I said, what I normally do, which is a few families here and there, we figured out a way where we could reach a mass of people at one time … It just seemed like with everything that was going on, this had the stronger effect.

What does it mean to you as a business owner who just marked six years on Tuckaseegee to be able to hold community events like the Big Turkey Pull Up and connect with your neighbors?

It’s extremely important to me because I feel like people spend their hard-earned money to support you all year long when things are well for them. And a lot of times, a lot of businesses don’t give back to the community that serves them when things are hard for the community.

And so I think it’s extremely important that if you want to be accepted by the community on a continual basis, it has to be a mutually beneficial relationship, it can’t just be because you provide a product that they enjoy.

Sometimes people hit hard times, things aren’t going well, the economy shifts, things change. If you’re in a position to at least give back something, I honestly think that’s my duty. So that’s going to be a continual thing … The one thing I definitely want to do, especially where I am, is maintain that connection with the community.

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