Why a 30-Seat Kitchen in Custer Keeps Showing Up on the James Beard List
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Book a table at Skogen Kitchen on a Saturday in Custer and you may be looking at a wait of weeks. That is not a complaint anyone in town makes anymore. It has simply become the going rate for dinner at a restaurant that seats a few dozen people at most, in a town that had fewer than 2,000 residents when the restaurant first opened its doors.
What is less commonly known, even among people who eat there regularly, is how far that reputation now reaches. Skogen Kitchen's chef, Joseph Raney, has been named a James Beard Award Midwest semifinalist twice, in 2023 and again in 2025. In 2026, the honor extended to a second restaurant from the same team: Hjem AM, Skogen's sister concept, picked up its own semifinalist nod. Three nods, two restaurants, one small building off Main Street. That is not a fluke. It is a pattern, and it says something specific about what this town has built.
The James Beard Foundation runs one of the most closely watched award programs in American food, the kind that has historically recognized names like Wolfgang Puck and Julia Child. Getting named a semifinalist once is a real distinction for any restaurant. Getting there twice for the same chef, then a third time for a second restaurant under the same ownership, is the kind of run that small-town restaurants almost never put together, because the volume and visibility required usually favor bigger cities with bigger dining rooms.
Skogen Kitchen has neither. It opened on May 4, 2017, which puts it in its ninth year of service as of 2026. The space seats a small crowd by design, not by accident. Owners Joseph and Eliza Raney have said publicly that they keep the menu tight and the room small on purpose, so the kitchen can focus on doing a few dishes exceptionally well rather than spreading itself across a long menu. Nine years in, with three James Beard nods on the wall between two restaurants, that bet looks less like a limitation and more like the actual strategy.
The backstory is worth knowing because it explains why so many locals still talk about this restaurant as one of theirs rather than a name imported from somewhere else. Joseph and Eliza met while working in the restaurant industry in Southern California, where Joseph trained in Hollywood and both worked with organizations including Disney and the Patina Restaurant Group. Eliza had grown up in a small Minnesota town and wanted to find that kind of place again. Custer became the answer, and Joseph made an offer on a house here on his first visit to South Dakota.
Before Skogen existed, Joseph cooked at Sage Creek Grille and Eliza worked at Black Hills Burger & Bun Co, filling in as a substitute teacher in the Custer schools on the side. It was the owners of Burger & Bun Co who eventually offered the couple a small building around the corner if Joseph wanted to open his own place. They took two nights to test the idea before committing to it, hosting community members for breakfast-for-dinner one night and a full dinner service the next, just to see if the town would show up.
People in town remember being skeptical going in. Christy Chamberlin, a longtime supporter who has held a standing reservation ever since that first week, put the early doubt plainly:
"We were concerned about such a high-end restaurant being successful in Custer."
The doubt did not hold. Chamberlin and fellow regular Bob Reich have kept a standing reservation for years now, and the restaurant they doubted has gone on to rank as the top restaurant in Custer on Tripadvisor, with more than 400 reviews and a 4.9 out of 5 rating.
Skogen did not build Custer's food and drink scene by itself, and it would be a mistake to tell this story as if one restaurant explains an entire downtown. The more accurate read is that Custer already had the ingredients for a serious food scene, and Skogen's national attention gave people outside the Black Hills a reason to notice the rest of it.
Mt. Rushmore Brewing Company, sitting along the George S. Mickelson Trail, runs what it describes as the largest barrel-aged beer program in South Dakota, spread across three distinct settings under one roof: a casual Taproom, the more elevated Pounding Fathers Restaurant upstairs, and the 21-and-over Barrel Room. It is open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., which makes it one of the more dependable stops in town for a meal that does not require a reservation weeks out.
The rest of the current downtown rotation includes:
None of these are new discoveries to anyone who lives here. What is worth sitting with is the range across that list, fine dining, brewpub, taproom, Mexican bistro, pie shop, all inside a town small enough to walk end to end. That range is not typical for a town this size, and it did not happen because one restaurant got famous. It happened because Custer had a food culture worth building on before the James Beard Foundation ever noticed.
If Skogen is the plan for a specific night, the operating hours matter. The restaurant serves dinner Tuesday through Saturday, from 5 to 8 p.m., and during the busier months it has not been taking reservations through third-party platforms like OpenTable, meaning the only reliable path is calling the restaurant directly. Reservations booked weeks, sometimes months, out are the norm, and showing up without one during peak season is a gamble.
Mt. Rushmore Brewing Company is the more flexible option if you are deciding same-day, given its daily 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. hours and three separate seating areas that can absorb walk-ins more easily than a 30-seat dining room built around a tasting-menu pace.
The headline fact here is not that Custer has good food. Plenty of small tourist towns have a decent restaurant or two. The fact worth holding onto is that a couple took a real risk on an idea the town itself doubted, kept the restaurant small enough to protect the thing that made it good, and turned that discipline into three national semifinalist nods across two restaurants in less than a decade. That is a specific, repeatable kind of success, not a lucky write-up. It is also a small window into the kind of town Custer actually is: one where an ambitious idea, done carefully and kept small on purpose, can still find an audience willing to wait weeks for a table.
If you are weighing what day-to-day life in a town like Custer actually feels like, the restaurant scene is a fair place to start looking. For the property side of that question, Heartland Real Estate is glad to talk it through. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
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