Who We Are

We're Mary and Erik, and Purslane is our love letter to Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, built on relationships with small farms across rural Wisconsin.

Mary grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and trained at the Madison College Culinary Arts Program and UW Madison. She started cooking professionally in Madison — Restaurant Muramoto, 43 North — before moving to Boston in 2011. Two restaurants there, Oleana and Sarma, are where she really fell for the bright, spice-forward food of the Eastern Mediterranean. In 2019 she came back to Wisconsin as Executive Chef at the Driftless Cafe in Viroqua, and years of travel through Northern Spain, Turkey, and Western Europe kept sharpening the point of view — work that earned her a James Beard semifinalist nomination for Best Chef, Midwest, in 2022.

Purslane began as a pop-up in Viroqua in the summer of 2024, built around an ever-growing list of small and family farms. In the summer of 2025 we opened its first real home: a little kitchen on Milwaukee's east side at 1751 N Farwell Ave.

Come taste where a phone call to a farmer can take a menu.