Tall Grass Gives Elena Terry a Permanent Place to Cook in Madison

By Jamie Dutton
6:25 a.m. CT, July 29, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: With family across the Midwest and a job that has her constantly in airports, Jamie Dutton travels the Heartland regularly. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell's.

Elena Terry has spent years cooking in borrowed kitchens, at pop-up dinners, and for organizations ranging from the James Beard Foundation to the United Nations. Tall Grass, her restaurant inside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, finally gives the Ho-Chunk chef a kitchen meant to last.

The restaurant occupies the former museum store at street level, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows and entrances connecting it to State Street, the Overture Center, and the museum gallery. Its name refers to the tallgrass prairies that once covered much of southern Wisconsin and will also be represented by a micro-prairie planned for the museum roof.

Chef Elena Terry Tall Grass Madison Wisconsin

Terry, a butcher and wild-game specialist, is the founder of Wild Bearies, a nonprofit focused on indigenous foodways, culinary education, and stronger tribal food systems. Her television appearances have included Top Chef, Chopped, and BBQ Brawl, while her cooking has taken her to the Smithsonian and other national stages. Tall Grass is her first permanent restaurant.

The menu is expected to cover smoked meats, baked goods, local produce, and carefully sourced ingredients. There’s a breakfast parfait made with Greek yogurt, maple syrup, blueberries, sweetgrass compote, and chia seeds. Tall Grass also plans to serve Wonderstate Coffee and pastries from FEED Bakery’s training program.

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Chef Elena Terry Tall Grass Madison Wisconsin

Restaurants devoted to Indigenous American food remain rare. One of the country’s best-known examples is Sean Sherman’s Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni, which grew from a project centered on precolonial ingredients and Indigenous producers. Tall Grass follows its own path. Terry has said the menu will draw on her French training, regional farms, and community partnerships rather than limit itself to Indigenous ingredients.

Chef Elena Terry Tall Grass Madison Wisconsin Live fire

The plan is for Tall Grass to become several restaurants across the course of a day: a morning café, an accessible lunch stop for State Street, and a more ambitious dinner destination with occasional guest-chef events. It will also handle catering for the museum.

For Terry, the most meaningful part may be the museum’s decision to treat cooking as art. “Now I get to live my dream, with my community, on my ancestral homeland,” she said in MMoCA’s announcement of the restaurant. After years without a permanent home for her cooking, she’ll have one in Madison, in a building designed for people to stop, look, and consider what an artist is trying to say.