When recent headlines announced that 50,000 hopefuls had joined a swamped phone queue for the chance to land a reservation at the gloriously mediocre Casa Bonita Mexican restaurant , I had just one question:
“Why?”
I’m genuinely curious.
The only restaurant on Earth I would ever wait behind 50,000 people to get into is the King’s Food Host in Arvada – but it closed in 1978 and is now a Wendy’s. ( Yes, the pull of the Cheese Frenchee remains strong .)
I’m as nostalgic as the next person. Like many thousands of other Coloradans, my life has crisscrossed with the Lakewood theme park like that kids game we played with fingers and a ball of yarn. My string is full of happy Casa Bonita memories.
Not so much to start. Young, first-timer John, not yet schooled in the glory of Mexican food that would come with the later discovery of Taco Bell, stood at the end of the ordering line, glanced down the daunting, cafeteria-style Casa Bonita menu and chose the safest option: The Mexican Hamburger. Several seated hours in the bathroom later ensured that years would pass before my next visit.
But I did come back. And I do get it, the emotional pull. I envied my several friends who worked as cliff divers. None, as far as I know, suffered even once over finding a date, if you know what I mean.
My next life as “Uncle Jolly” has meant many happy returns for wee ones’ birthday blowouts. I have spent hours (and hundreds of dollars) in that dump of an arcade in pursuit of just enough tickets to land perhaps the tiniest of stuffed animals – but inevitably settling for a glow-in-the dark rubber ball. I’ve had brushes with fluids on the wall of Black Bart’s Cave that I can never really wash clean. (And believe me, it wasn’t honey from the sopaipillas.)
In 2006, as a reporter for The Denver Post, I took a group of six then-unknown comics from The Second City in Chicago for a visit to Casa Bonita. They were here to perform their original sketch-comedy show titled “ How I Lost my Denverginity .” After three hours of sopaipilla-scarfing, Black Bart-booing, piñata-busting, arcade-playing good times, Jenny Hagel was so lost she had to call her pal Amber Ruffin for rescue. ( Yes, they are the comedy duo now famous for their appearances on “ Late Night with Seth Meyers .”)
“This place is a terrifying labyrinth,” Hagel later told me. She learned the hard way that Casa Bonita is a place where even adults need a buddy system.
Back in the late 1980s, my dad bought the bar across the street called Eddie’s Cordial. Largely because of renewed business interest in the area immediately surrounding Casa Bonita, it was scraped earlier this year. Taking its cheesy tater tots, $3 PBR pitchers and neighborhood history with it.
Casa Bonita is the unlikeliest survivor.
But nostalgia alone can't be the only reason for this overblown and ongoing phenomenon of people frothing to get back into the place. The cliff-diving is undeniably kitschy fun; I have had my caricature drawn there by the best of artists; and, as far as I am concerned, the sugar bread is a perfectly acceptable stand-in for a meal all by itself.
But I seriously don’t get it. “I enjoyed going there in my youth” is a vastly inadequate reason to explain why 50,000 would jump into a lottery for an opportunity to return, considering that next to no one I know was going to Casa Bonita in the years immediately before the shutdown.
But, I have been told: Casa Bonita salvagers Matt Stone and Trey Parker have put $40 million into renovations to make the place look – pretty much just like it did before. Dubious. Same for: “But they have hired an executive chef” – because that would imply that people are now going for the food. I mean, if you are going for the food, surely you’d want to go … someplace else, right?
So what’s really going on here? For the answer, I turned to those humans I am most closely emotionally bonded to – my faceless Facebook friends, of course. Their responses made it plain that I am pretty much alone in my bewilderment. But after hearing from so many of them, I do feel like I understand this whole thing a bit better.
When Casa Bonita shut down during the pandemic, it appeared to be gone for good. Then came Colorado’s own “South Park” creators Parker and Stone, who drew international media attention for their left-field rescue plan.
The zeitgeisters technically reopened the restaurant in 2023, but the general public was not allowed an equal shot to get in until the bizarro Sept. 16 reservation lottery. People hopped aboard like it was the last train to Clarksville . (Anyone under 60: Ask your grandparents.) Important people with respectable jobs and purposeful lives like Marc Ravenhill, associate director of development and donor relations at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts . He even signed up as a member – whatever that means (presumably for preferred access).
“I was in the queue at 8:30 a.m., with a 9 a.m. start time, and there were already 22,000 ahead of me,” he shared. “It took more than three hours to get to the reservation page.”
Eventually, there were enough people in line to fill Folsom Field in Boulder. That’s bonkers.
Denver’s Phil Cope jumped in because he wants to get his kid into the restaurant, and his reason hit me square in the heart: “Not a lot of Old Denver remains,” he said. “I can't take him to Celebrity Sports Center , the Old Spaghetti Factory or Funplex. Elitch’s and The Tattered Cover Book Store aren't the same. Can't go watch the Denver Zephyrs (our last minor-league baseball team). But because two native sons are bad with money, Casa Bonita remains.
“I hope the ‘Matt and Trey of it all’ is inspiring for a young person," he went on. "I haven't watched ‘South Park’ for years, but they changed the animation industry by refusing to compromise. And Matt refused to compromise on the silly task of saving a building that should have been torn down. And that feels worthy of celebrating.”
Can’t argue with that. And I have one bit of good news for Phil: The Old Spaghetti Factory is still churning out pasta and Crayola placemats out of its trolly at 9145 Sheridan Blvd. in Westminster.
Kate Horle, who’s kind of a big deal as the Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Work Education and Employment in Denver, reminded me that most of us are from somewhere else, and Casa Bonita is proving to be a huge boon to local tourism.
You can’t underestimate the curiosity of the “South Park” fandom who have made Casa Bonita a mandatory travel destination, especially given the legendary 2003 South Park episode titled, yes, “Casa Bonita.”
And now here comes a glorifying new documentary called “ ¡Casa Bonita, Mi Amor! ” This big-buzz movie, produced by MTV Documentary Films, tells how Parker and Stone became galvanized to save our quirky little “strip-mall Disneyland of Mexican restaurants.” The doc was even spotlighted at the oh-so-trendy Tribeca Film Festival and has a “100% Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. NPR calls it a treat "that weaves together great archival footage plus countless scenes of Parker and Stone’s amused horror when they hear the latest reason why their labor of love is becoming a money pit.”
The film is presently playing at least once daily at the Sloan’s Lake Alamo Drafthouse Cinema .
If you rebuild it, apparently, they will come.
“Here’s what’s truly fascinating about all this,” Horle observed. “People are coming from all over the country to Denver for the purposes of going to Casa Bonita. For real.”
My theater friend Shannon Johnson is the project manager at Barbizon Lighting Company , and she told me not to play down those $40 million in upgrades. Now, Shannon speaks in terms like light switches and Fresnels and trusses , so most of the time, I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. But I do understand that there are now moving lights around the waterfall and stage, and the magic show has all new technology.
“We control the whole building, including shifting the lights on the outside of the building that change the mood according to the time of day,” Johnson said. “The soundscape spans the whole building interior. The entertainers are top-notch professionals from Denver, and the director is formerly Disney. I guarantee there is nothing like it in Colorado. It’s so much better than the original, it's laughable.”
And, here it is again: “It is Disney in Colorado!” (Which I am to believe is a good thing.)
Brian Murray of Denver is a computer wiz and dad who took his kids, and they loved it. The place is cleaner and the food is better, he confirmed. (It's also way more expensive.) “But going around it, I can see that Casa Bonita is now clearly more for the adults who grew up with it,” he said. “There are two new bars where there used to be kids' stuff. The puppet show had more adult humor than kid humor, and even though they stayed true to Casa Bonita ideals, there are ‘South Park’ references sprinkled throughout the place.” (Side note: Each drink at those new bars comes with its own special lighting effect, Johnson said.)
The new Casa Bonita, Murray decided, “is an homage to our youth. And what person wouldn't want to escape to a time when we didn't have the responsibilities we have now while still being able to drink a margarita?”
To this point, I have felt absolutely zero urge to revisit the new and improved Casa Bonita myself. I’m still inclined to side with my equally caustic journo friend, Mark Obmascik, who summarizes all of this craziness as “a suburban phenomenon made possible only after Colorado legalized weed.”
But after digesting all this new information far better than that first Mexican Hamburger of yore, sure, I might be down to clown. I have only one request: Replace the Mexican Burger on the menu with the Cheese Frenchee , and I’m there.
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