Robert Simonson and Mary Kate Murray’s love for Wisconsin is like a bottomless old fashioned. Since moving from NYC to Simonson’s home state in 2025, the couple have been chronicling their diverse Wisco discoveries – in an offbeat, reverential tone – in The Milwaukee Mix.
Cocktails and drinking culture – the subject of the 62-year-old Simonson’s life work as a writer, including for Milwaukee Magazine and The New York Times – are part of that. But The Milwaukee Mix is a lot more, and that’s partly because of his wife, a native New Jerseyan. “I’m one of those [Wisconsin] converts,” laughs Murray, 61. Though based in the Big Apple for decades, Simonson – who was born in Milwaukee and raised here and in Eagle – says he always figured he’d eventually end up back in the Badger State. It turns out home ownership was the catalyst – Wisconsin was a whole lot more affordable than New York state.
Celebrate this year’s winners of the Betty Awards!
Their Northwest Side mid-century dwelling is proving its value beyond home equity. It sparks content for The Milwaukee Mix, an offshoot of The Mix with Robert Simonson, a drinking-focused newsletter he and Murray launched in 2022. New stories to the Milwaukee spinoff are posted roughly once a week. The audience for its sometimes “quirky” coverage – dispatches from small towns, cheese curd reviews, home bars with big personalities, recipes with stories to tell – is slowly growing, Simonson says.
“Wisconsin has a certain fascination for the rest of the nation,” he adds, with Murray chiming in that Milwaukee is “underappreciated and undervalued.”
Murray’s very different career path was in the architecture field, where she worked for 30 years as an executive assistant. The Milwaukee Mix has added a new title – writer. That’s good, Simonson says, because people “don’t want to hear me all the time.” Plus, her voice is “very different,” he says, “much more personal, more storytelling.”
Simonson doesn’t treat the digital pubs as a side hustle, either. It’s basically a full-time job, he says. “We get story ideas in the oddest way,” he adds, “because we wander around.” That’s how they found the thrift-store postcard/photo of the old Heaven City Hotel in Mukwonago, which became a story subtitled, “Dining, Drinking and Demagoguery at a Now Abandoned Wisconsin Resort.” Another story grew from an old jazz album, also bought secondhand, that turned out to have been recorded at the Red Mill Inn in Brookfield (which still exists, at least in name).
The couple loves diving deep into the rabbit holes. “We even go to the graveyards, see where people are buried,” says Murray. Simonson nods: “It’s been a kind of hilarious coincidence that a lot of the stories I’ve researched, the people in them end up having been laid to rest at one of two graveyards,” each within a mile of the couple’s home.
Simonson also still pursues “drinking journalism” – his latest book, “Bourbon and Rye Cocktails,” will be out in mid-October. That content comes second-nature. But this move back home has opened up new avenues of writing possibilities. “I always felt that my parents didn’t necessarily take me to all the places that I wanted to go” in Wisconsin, he says. “I always felt there was more I wanted to learn about Milwaukee, but we never got to the city enough. So now that I’m here, I feel like I’m making up for lost time.”
