That was Rob’s primary criteria for a venue — something weird and wonderful that would set the stage for an epic party. Plus, he pointed out, maybe if people started having parties there, it would survive.
He had a point: The Pepto Bismol-colored palace of Acapulco-inspired dinner entertainment had certainly seen better days. A couple of years earlier, I’d celebrated my 31st birthday there and left feeling, well, kind of sad. The place was mostly empty; the live entertainers warbled off-color lines into a broken microphone; and the whole place could best be described as saturated — with grime, with the overwhelming musk of chlorine and disinfectant, with gauzy memories of a heyday that seemed long gone.
The patrons were like Rob and I — people who were willing to overlook all manner of sin because of a rosy nostalgia for the Casa Bonita of our youth. I eventually put my foot down on having the wedding there (I couldn’t get my mind around serving off-brand Velveeta), but I did agree to take our out-of-town guests during a tour of our favorite Denver spots; Casa Bonita was sandwiched between the Clyfford Still Museum and a brewery.
Rob instructed everyone to order the taco salad before buying out the glow stick vendor’s entire collection. Our guests’ reactions ranged from mild amusement to complete bewilderment. Some friends bought us Casa Bonita Dive Team shirts to commemorate the event. Nobody liked the food. At that point, it was difficult to imagine that Casa Bonita would rise again to become the hottest table in town.
But here we are, five years later, with a virtual queue in the tens of thousands, and with the details of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s multimillion-dollar remodel sprinkled tantalizingly across national news outlets. South Park probably single-handedly sustained the place longer than it should have, with fans and lookie-loos making a pilgrimage despite its decline. Now Stone and Parker are promising that they’ve restored it to its original glory. And it was once truly glorious.
It was a restaurant erected for a different era — one where your parents would kick you outside in the summer and say, “Be home by dark." Casa Bonita was a similar kind of choose-your-own-unsupervised adventure: Your parents would sit at a sticky table sipping soda from a translucent red plastic cup, and you and your gang of siblings and friends would explore the caves, grottoes, arcade games and kiddie entertainment.
Eventually, some vague sense of not having seen your family for hours would set in, and you’d try to find Mom or Dad to make sure they hadn’t decided to leave you with the cliff divers forever. Were they near the wishing well or the palapa? How do we get out from behind the waterfall again? Quick! Avoid the charging gorilla!
The food was also less out of place in the 90s — and we cared more about picking the color of our tray and silverware roll-up (red, green or blue) than we did about which processed-cheese-covered entree we would eventually eat. We all knew that once we hit the table and raised the flag, we would be filling our sopaipillas to the brim with honey, anyway.
And speaking of tables, we’d beg the host — a gatekeeper with a headset — for one in the grotto so we could better see the performers nail ten-point dives into the tiny pool below while we ate. Once finished, we traipsed through Black Bart’s Cave, screaming when we touched the roaring skeleton, marveling at the glowing gems, and sprinting over the bridge to avoid the hands of the older kids hiding beneath to grab our ankles.
We’d take in the puppet show and the magic show; the latter is still the only time I’ve ever seen a magician pull a rabbit from a hat in real life. We’d eventually try to win enough tickets in the arcade to purchase a really good prize — usually settling instead for a bouncy ball and a couple of plastic jumpy frogs. Then we'd be dragged from the place by our parents, our departure made easier by the treasure chest full of candy awaiting us near the exit.
At least I think all of this happened: The weird nature of Casa Bonita means my memories feel supremely unreliable. When I returned to Casa Bonita in my twenties, that bridge in Black Bart’s Cave seemed to have been long since (and perhaps always) filled under with cement that would preclude any ankle-grabbing. When I was tapping family members for memories for this story, Rob said, “Remember how hard it was to find the mine?” I said, “What mine?”
Shunk with her husband, Rob, who remembers visiting a mine that may or may not have existed at Casa Bonita.
Laura Shunk
In adulthood, he was similarly amused and mildly disgusted by the place by the time he started taking my brother and me there twenty years later: “It was like the La Brea Tar Pits when you guys were kids,” he remembers. “You’d put your foot in a certain spot and wouldn’t be able to get it unstuck.” But the food, he agrees, wasn’t branded as abysmal until my generation of Food Network snobs reached maturity.
Like most families we knew, we celebrated birthdays and ends of school years there, and visited after big soccer tournaments or choir concerts. It was a do-not-miss destination for our out-of-town guests, put up on the pedestal right along with the snowcapped Rocky Mountains and the Denver Mint — things one could only see in the Mile High City. My family went several Halloweens in a row, buoyed by a second-place win in the restaurant’s costume contest, back when competing in that contest meant going up against hundreds of other kids to win a Casa Bonita gift certificate.
The line for food in that era snaked to the door, and we waited in it without thinking twice, the way I might now join a queue for a new croissant-ified pastry. That at least three generations of Denverites have formative memories like mine made a remodel of Casa Bonita fraught: Yes, it was in dire need of updates and improvements, but when something is a childhood cultural touchstone, you don’t really want it to change.
What Stone and Parker have done to Casa Bonita, then, is truly remarkable. They have lovingly invested millions of dollars in it to make it…the same. Or at least the same as it was in my youth, in all the important ways. Most of that money seems to have been spent on cleaning and restoration; I eavesdropped on a builder talking about the process for restoring the palapa table, for which he removed and cleaned each individual palm frond.
The remodel left the key structural elements intact: The layout is the same, down to the grotto tables, puppet theater, waterfall bridge, wishing well and arcade. The skeleton still roars, and gems still glow in Black Bart’s Cave. There’s still weird stuff around every corner, promising to fuel a whole new generation of unreliable memory-making. And while the dive pool is cleaner, bluer, a bit bigger and more sparkly from star-studded ceiling tiles, it’s exactly where it used to be — in the heart of the restaurant, the epicenter of the entertainment experience.
Of course there are some updates, which seem mostly designed to appeal to the current generation of adults. Bars are easy to find. Dolly Parton grins up from the wishing well. (Was she always there?)
The entertainment has been scrubbed of its problematic elements and updated to appeal to all ages. The magic show, for instance, leans into both the surreal nature of the location and a kitschy interpretation of the bygone era from which Casa Bonita rose, while still managing to turn some pretty good tricks. There are some cheeky but subtle jokes for Denverites — I was well into dinner before I spied the street sign near my table that read “Calle Juan el Way.”
The taco salad is back, but way fresher than before, with the option to include picadillo.
Molly Martin
The verdict? I’d put the rehabbed Casa Bonita right up there with Stranger Things and Meow Wolf — other recent masterful creations that tap a deep nostalgia in the youngest Boomers along with Gen Xers and Millennials for the campy kid horror-adventure entertainment that fueled our childhood fantasies and neighborhood games.
Yes, I’m excited to raise my sons, nieces and nephews on trips to Casa Bonita, hopefully letting them roam in the free-form way I did as a child as they discover all the weird and wonderful things that make the place one-of-a-kind.
But I’m also excited for me, to get a bit of my childhood back in such a visceral way. So much so that I found myself getting misty as I called out, “Thank you!” to Stone as he passed by my table during the soft opening.
One more big update: The refurbished theater is now truly beautiful, with its gilded touches and red leather banquettes. It seems like a prime spot for swanky cocktail parties — or even weddings. Maybe it’s time for Rob and me to renew our vows.
