About

Brothers Michael and Jimmy Chidiac, along with Michael’s best friend, Ross Crago, crafted the concept of the Prairie Dog mobile food kitchen in early 2020. Their mission: to serve something very common, uncommonly well. What started out as more of a humorous idea turned into a real business one year later.

The Prairie Dog began its journey in Custer, South Dakota, in a pop-up tent situated on Boyd’s Antiques’ property on Highway 385 near the Crazy Horse Monument. Why were we in a pop-up tent? Because COVID had delayed production of our mobile food kitchen, and we had purchased a bunch of equipment that was sitting in Michael’s cabin and barn as exhibits! “So we decided to put the equipment to good use.”

We opened on August 8, 2021, and sold our first dog to the owner of Boyd’s. We were off to the races. Not! Everyone in town told us that we would “crush it” during Sturgis Rally week because hundreds of thousands of bikers drive by Boyd’s every day. So we adequately prepared for our opening by purchasing 3,500+ hot dogs and 3,700+ hot dog buns. We had chips for sides and paper plates and napkins for serving. Those hundreds of thousands of bikers — yep, they did drive by our location… and kept going. There were days we didn’t sell a single bag of potato chips. It was the longest two weeks of our lives.

Not only did we deal with the lack of traffic and sales, but the wind was so strong that half the time we were physically holding on to our pop-up tent to prevent it from taking off like a kite! And when it rained, we had to close up the tent and nervously watch a large killer fly disassemble smaller flies — pondering if we were next! Weather is a different beast in the Black Hills, and you have to be ready for it. Many times, you could find us walking the Michelson Trail a couple of times a week, looking for our road signs. LOL.

We’ve come a long way since those pop-up tent days in 2021. In the summer of 2023, we began formulating the concept for The Prairie Dog Taproom while working in our mobile food kitchen on the Miner Brewery campus. We spent two seasons studying the buying habits of craft beer consumers and discovered inherent constraints. We believed we could address those constraints by combining our mobile food kitchen commercial model with a self-service tap model that Michael first observed in 2019 in Florida.

In December 2024, we were fortunate enough to purchase the former Smokejumper Firehouse Brewery and Winery in Hill City, SD. We spent three months remodeling, and on March 27, 2025, The Prairie Dog Taproom was officially open for business!