Remembering Chef Max Hardy, the Star Who Made Crab & Cruise® a Show

By Greg Cain, Founder and CEO of CrabPlace.com

I miss my friend.

Max Hardy was a staple at our events for years. He ran the food at our crab parties, he brought his own crew with him, and somewhere in all of that we became really good friends. I miss him dearly.

Chef Maxcel Hardy died on March 4, 2024. He was 40 years old. He had a heart attack at dinner in Detroit, and just like that, a man with more plans than most people have years was gone.

I have started this post four or five times over the last two years. Every time I put it down, because writing it makes it final. But Max mattered to this company and he mattered to me, and if I do not write it down somewhere permanent it lives only in the heads of the people who were there. So here it is.

Most of our customers know Max as the chef who cooked at Crab & Cruise®. That is true, and it undersells him badly.

We met at the Knicks game that started Linsanity

This part still makes me laugh.

Our partner Rebecca lives in New York and in Lewes, Delaware, and back then she was renting out her place in the West Village. Her tenant was Amar'e Stoudemire, who was playing for the Knicks at the time. Max was Amar'e's personal chef.

Amar'e's contract included a pair of courtside seats that the Knicks held for him. For one game, as a favor to his landlord, his agent Happy Walters let Rebecca have that pair. (Happy is one of Adam Sandler's closest friends. Sandler named Happy Gilmore after him, which is the kind of thing you learn on a night like that and never forget.)

Rebecca handed those two seats to Matt and me and sat with Max across the arena in the lower level. This was February 4, 2012, and it turned out to be the night Linsanity started. Jeremy Lin came off the bench against the Nets and put up 25 points, the Knicks won 99 to 92, and Madison Square Garden came apart. Amar'e scored 17 of his own. I have never heard a building that loud. At some point Rebecca walked us over and introduced us, and Max and I hit it off right there.

Happy dropped into the seat next to us partway through the game, just to say hello. And we rode the elevator up from the floor after the game with Walt Frazier. The whole night was surreal.

About a month later he drove down to Crisfield just to see the place.

He fell for Crisfield on the first visit

Crisfield is a small town at the end of a long road, and some visitors need a minute to warm to it. Max did not. He walked around, met people, looked at the water, and decided he liked it. He saw the potential in this town right away. He came back for the next twelve years.

We were already running Crab & Cruise®, one weekend a year, back when it meant putting a tent up in the parking lot. There was no event venue on the front of the building yet. That came later.

Max became a piece of it. We built a Friday night weekend-kickoff dinner around him. People bought a ticket, sat down to a meal, and watched him cook it in front of them. That first Friday he did a full dinner spread for a local crowd. The next day, at the main event, the chefs he brought with him took the catering over and cooked the ribs and the wings, and Max worked his chef table cutting a seafood ceviche. Then we ran the party.

I flew in Blue Stone Circle, the house band at Margaritaville in Orlando. I had gotten to know them and they were fantastic. They played on the boat Saturday night after the crab feast, and they played Friday night after Max finished his demo at The Crab Place. We took some weather Friday that knocked us around for a while. It did not matter. The whole weekend was awesome.

Lefty Driesell came that weekend too, the Hall of Fame coach who put Maryland basketball on the map, and Crisfield handed him the keys to the city. It was an event to remember.

That was our first Crab & Cruise® with Max, and after it he was in. He wanted to keep coming.

Watch his first Crab & Cruise®

Max never traveled alone. He brought photographers and videographers with him, which is the only reason we have decent footage of those early years at all. AM Media Group cut this recap of the 2013 weekend.

If you want to understand what Max was about, three minutes of this will do it faster than anything I can write.

What he actually cooked for us

As Crab & Cruise® grew we gave Max a couple of weekends a year. By then we had built the venue, so the parking lot tent was history. He would cook Friday night and Saturday night and take the catering side over completely.

The rule was simple. Crabs, shrimp, and corn were ours. Everything else was Max's. Ribs, mac and cheese, a crab mac and cheese that people still bring up. On paper it was a similar menu to our normal event. Run through his hands, it came out different and better.

The night at the city dock

One year we did a Friday night dinner at the pavilion on the Crisfield city dock, ahead of a Saturday event.

It was an intimate, high-end setting for twenty people, ten couples. We put them on three pontoon boats for a cocktail hour, cruised, came back in to the dock, and took them up to the second-story platform on the pavilion. We ate up there and watched the sun go down. We stayed off seafood on purpose, since they were eating crabs the next day, so Max did steak. He did a shrimp skewer as well, and an amazing watercress-type salad that I can still see on the plate to this day. The presentation was what you would expect in a city restaurant, not on a working dock in Crisfield.

The crowd was a professional, upscale group out of DC. They were amazed. We had a former NBA player and his wife there that night and they had a ball. It is still one of my favorite evenings we have ever put on.

Then we took it to Florida

We started running crab parties down in Florida in 2014 and did them six years running, right through 2019. The pandemic ended it in 2020. We called it the Tampa Crab Party because that is the region, but it was the same spot every year, Gators Cafe on Treasure Island.

The first one down there was an actual Crab & Cruise®. We found a boat that would take us out and it was a spectacular evening. After that they became crab party events out on the decks at Gators. Sometimes we brought a DJ, sometimes a band. Everybody ate, the music played, and then the music kept going into the night and people danced.

Max set up and ran his paella at those. We brought other caterers in to help with the rest, but the paella was his, and it was a show. People stood in line with a plate in their hand as much to talk to him as to eat. Anyone who was ever in that line knows what I mean.

Wherever we were going, Max wanted to be there. That is the plainest way I can put it.

He brought his people with him

Max collected people, and then he shared them.

He brought us DJ LS One, who was DMX's touring DJ with the Ruff Ryders and later part of the G-Unit family. LS One worked a couple of Crab & Cruise® weekends for us and he killed it.

Jerome has cooked for Shaquille O'Neal and spent time as the personal chef for Brevin Knight in Charlotte. Rudy is a private chef working out of New York and New Jersey. Max ran with people at that level and then hauled them to a town of 2,500 on the Eastern Shore because he was sure they would love it.

For our Ultimate Summer Crab Party with DJ Jazzy Jeff at Somers Cove Marina in August 2022, Max showed up with four other chefs. Chi Walker and Nik R. Cole, who run the Fried Chicken and Caviar pop-up in Detroit, came down with him, along with Chef Troy. Rudy Straker came in the next day for the event itself. That was Max. You asked him for a chef and he brought a brigade.

The guest list got interesting over the years. Larry Johnson, the former Pro Bowl Kansas City Chiefs running back, came up one year to DJ the boat on the Friday night, and the On The Edge band played the Saturday. Max and Larry closed that weekend out on the boat together.

Who he was when he was not with us

Max was born in Detroit on December 5, 1983, and raised in south Florida by his mother and his grandmother. His mother was Bahamian, and that is where his cooking came from. The food in that house was his first education, and you could taste it in everything he made forty years later.

He started in the culinary program at Wharton High School in Tampa and earned a scholarship to Johnson & Wales in Miami. He built a private chef business, Chef Max Miami, cooking for athletes and celebrities. He spent five years as Amar'e Stoudemire's full-time chef, and the two of them co-wrote a cookbook called Cooking with Amar'e.

Then he went home. He moved back to Detroit and opened River Bistro in Rosedale Park in 2017, then Coop Caribbean Fusion inside the Detroit Shipping Company, then Jed's Detroit on East Seven Mile.

The recognition came fast. The New York Times named him one of 16 Black chefs changing food in America in 2019. Hour Detroit made him Restaurateur of the Year in 2021. The Detroit News named him a Michiganian of the Year the same year and gave him the Angelo Henderson award for his work with young people. He cooked on Beat Bobby Flay, on Chopped, and on BBQ Brawl.

When he died he was working on his next place, a seafood restaurant on the Avenue of Fashion called What's Crackin', which he wanted open in time for the NFL Draft coming to Detroit. Of course he was opening a seafood restaurant. We used to talk about crabs for hours.

The part he cared about most

Here is what I want people to take away about Max.

He founded a nonprofit called One Chef Can 86 Hunger. Through it he taught culinary classes to kids, fed essential workers when the restaurants were shut in 2020, and went out to feed people who were living on the street. During the pandemic he and another chef were out in Detroit feeding the homeless community every single day. It was cold, it was a bad stretch for everybody, and he wanted to help, so he helped.

None of that started in Detroit. In his New York years he was Director of Nutrition at the New York Food Bank, and what he built there was a nutrition program for the kids who came through the door.

He was deliberate about mentoring young Black chefs. He wanted kids in Detroit to see a man who looked like them running kitchens, owning restaurants, and being proud of it. He wanted a boy who liked to cook to understand that it was a real career and a good one and nothing to be quiet about.

My wife, Jessica, and I flew to Detroit in March 2024. It was two days at Triumph Church on East Grand Boulevard, where Max was a member. The wake on the Friday, the homegoing on Saturday morning, and the church was full both times. I would put it at four hundred people.

Saturday told you the reach he had. Hill Harper, the actor, who was running for the United States Senate in Michigan that year. Starex Smith, the food writer behind The Hungry Black Man. Dr. Teshanne Phillip, who runs the I Am Hope Foundation and had taken Max to Kenya to feed children and help build a school. His godbrother Brandon Perry and Chadwick Douglas. His uncle, Rev. Dr. Lloyd Wright, with Evelyn Boyd. Pastor Solomon Kinloch gave the eulogy. Every one of them spoke about him glowingly, and every one of them meant it.

But the part I still carry happened the day before. On the Friday they opened the floor in the church and let anybody who wanted to speak come up, and chef after chef did. What got me was how many of them said, in their own words, the same sentence. Max is the reason I am doing this. He told me I could. He opened a door and pushed me through it.

In April 2025 the Detroit Shipping Company set up the Chef Maxcel Hardy Memorial Culinary Scholarship, awarded through the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association to Detroit high school students going on to study culinary, baking, or pastry arts. That is exactly right. That is what he would have picked.

We want to also honor our friend

We have expansion work going on over on Seventh Street here in Crisfield. It is a daunting project and I am not going to pretend otherwise. We are going to make it happen anyway, because it has to.

There will be a Chef Max Kitchen. A place where we teach culinary, and where a kid from Crisfield gets the same shot Max spent his life handing to kids in Detroit. No matter how long it takes, I will make sure it happens.

What I miss

I miss the phone calls. I miss that line of people at the paella pan, half of them there for the food and half of them there for him. I miss the umpteenth request on the boat to play Maze’s We Are One. And I miss hearing “C’mon G” and looking up to see him holding shots of Grand Marnier in his hand after another successful event. I miss a man who could walk into a small town on the Chesapeake and find something to love about it inside of an afternoon.

Max made people happy, and then he went looking for the next person he could lift up. Forty years was not enough of that. But we got twelve of them, and Crisfield is better because he kept coming back.

Thank you, Max. From all of us at The Crab Place® and Crab & Cruise®. You will not be forgotten here in Crisfield.

Greg Cain is the founder and CEO of CrabPlace.com in Crisfield, Maryland.