Peggy Magister originally planned to be a nurse. She went to school for nursing and worked in that industry for a bit, but it didn’t stick. “She got an interest in cooking,” says Magister’s sister Lynn Gasper. Magister headed out West to study food at the California Culinary Institute and got her first job at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant Postrio in San Francisco. When she returned to Milwaukee, it was to carve out a spot in the dining industry here. Best known for her Walker’s Point restaurant Crazy Water (which operated from 2002-20), Magister passed away on June 7 after a short battle with cancer.
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In a city where woman-owned restaurants are not the norm, Magister was a pioneer. “She was always taking steps” toward running her own place, says her sister. “She really didn’t ever want to work for someone else.”
After moving back to her hometown, Magister worked at the 1980s-’90s Third Ward institution La Boulangerie. Focused on forging her own path, she started catering and opened a café in Cedarburg called The Fork. “She loved to cook. She loved to cook for people,” says Gasper. It wasn’t just being the boss. Magister wanted to be self-sufficient.
“She didn’t have backers. She took out a loan,” says her other sister, Cathy Anthony. And “she also did it by the skin of her teeth,” Gasper chimes in. “[Magister told her] ‘I don’t want to owe anyone. And I don’t want anybody telling me how to run my business.’ So she found every way she possibly could to do this on her own. She was driven.”
The café she owned and operated in Cedarburg was a stepping stone. She wanted to be in the city, say her sisters. At the time, in the early 2000s, Walker’s Point was not a dining destination. “She really felt strongly about going down there,” says Gasper. “I remember everybody was fighting her, ‘Don’t go down there. Don’t go down there. It’s too much of a risk. It’s too many chances.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, this is an area that is going to be developing, and I think they need to have good food also.’ “
At Crazy Water, which opened in the old German bar Zur Krone, diners could see Magister cooking at a tiny kitchen positioned next to the bar. At the time, the open kitchen concept – particularly one as minimalist as Crazy Water’s – wasn’t common. Magister cooking in the window became a familiar sight as diners walked up to the entrance. Crazy Water made critic’s best lists, including, consistently, those published in Milwaukee Magazine. In 2013, she and her nephew Justin Anthony opened All Purpose Bar & Kitchen across the street from Crazy Water. Despite its positive critical reception, it closed in 2017.
Kevin Sloan, who operated the wildly popular The Social, also on South Second Street, in the early 2000s, says he used to run into her while doing errands in the neighborhood and would “always stop and chat, mostly bonding over how challenging what we were doing was, and exchanging the joys and misery of it all.”
Says Sloan, “She was a sweet, strong and talented woman. Hearing of her sudden passing was a gut punch. She left a real mark on this city but would be the last to ever admit it. She will be missed, and her work will long be appreciated.”
Magister’s sisters say she was always thinking about the future when it came to Crazy Water. And that meant retiring that concept when she felt it had run its course. In the midst of the pandemic, she closed Crazy Water and opened La Dama Mexican Kitchen & Bar with her longtime head chef Emmanuel Corona. Two years ago, she turned over the keys to the business to him– but didn’t leave restaurants entirely. Up until two months before her death, she was working as a server at the Union House restaurant in Genesee Depot.
“She trusted me. It’s not easy to trust someone to run [your] kitchen,” says Corona, whom Magister originally hired when she was still running the café in Cedarburg. “She was like family.” When Magister brought Corona down to work at Crazy Water, she mentored him, he says, often taking him to restaurants in Milwaukee and Chicago. “I remember when we made the transfer to La Dama, she’s like, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Let’s do a Mexican restaurant.’ We’d always go out to eat and I’d tell her my ideas and once in a while I’d create specials [at Crazy Water] with Mexican flavors. She loved them, and was like, ‘Hey, let’s do it.’ “
Magister not only loved cooking, she loved running a restaurant. She wasn’t focused on getting recognition for it, say her sisters. And she loved her staff. “She didn’t have these defined lines about you’re an employee, and I’m your employer. Those lines were blurred all the time,” says Anthony.
“She was always wanting to reinvent herself,” adds Gasper. “Adversity wasn’t something she shied away from.”
After retiring from restaurant owning, Magister was able to spend more time at her home in Elkhorn, finally able to put energy into her garden and house. “It was so quirky,” says Gasper of her house. “And it’s so her. She had all this land and a garden. She loved nature. She loved gardening. Those were all things she never had time for.” Anthony jumps in. “Peggy had a horrible kitchen her whole life to work in – her home kitchen. She had just completed [redoing] the kitchen in her home [before her illness]. She didn’t get to use it.”
