‘South Park’ creators revive the world’s worst — and most fun — restauranthttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/13/stone-parker-south-park-casa-bonita/
Casa Bonita, purchased by the creators of "South Park" in 2021, is being renovated for reopening in Lakewood, Colo. (Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post/Getty Images)Americans of enormous wealth, Abby and John D. Rockefeller Jr. tapped their bottomless resources to restore a national treasure, Colonial Williamsburg. Long neglected, that hotbed of revolutionary fervor came back to life beneath a long, steady rain of money from the Rockefeller fortune.
That story came to mind when I recently read that Casa Bonita has been brought back from the dead and made grander than before. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the wealthy creators of the “South Park” TV series and the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon,” have done for a weird and wonderful, vaguely Mexican restaurant in suburban Denver what the Rockefellers did for Virginia’s cradle of democracy.
Not a perfect parallel, I grant you. Patrick Henry, hero of Williamsburg, never dined on the burrito plate at the lowbrow Chartres of strip-mall America. If he had, his famous plea might have been a simple: “Give me death.” The food was that bad. The only remotely palatable thing on the menu at Casa Bonita was puffed dough drizzled with honey, which patrons summoned to their tables by the basket load, simply by raising a flag. Thomas Jefferson, had he visited this place, might have added to our unalienable rights a bottomless supply of sopaipillas.
Yet this vast and slapdash place is as much a time capsule of the 1970s as Williamsburg is a vessel of the 1770s. Casa Bonita was to “ethnic food” as KC and the Sunshine Band was to soul.
Casa Bonita! The name was like Shangri-La to the children of Colorado and vicinity. The restaurant’s fame radiated from Denver along the crossing axes of I-70 and I-25, starting as reality, then blurring into myth like the stories of Marco Polo. At 52,000 square feet, the restaurant was said to be so large that people got lost in its winding mysteries. It was said that indoor waterfalls plunged into fiberglass cenotes carved in the floor. That lithe divers leaped from cliffs into the deepest pool, as dazzled diners plowed through plates of tepid refried beans. That kid-size caverns brimmed with silver and gold while Black Bart chased — but never quite caught — his quarry.
All true. I know because I was there when it was new in 1974. I remember the line that stretched forever out the door, along the pink facade and down the sidewalk. I was there again some 35 years later with my own children in tow. By that time, the pink tower was surrounded by pawnshops and dollar stores. Inside, the pleasure palace of my boyhood reeked of chlorine, flatulence and decay. The Old West costumes in the sepia photo studio practically jiggled with lice. It didn’t matter. My kids loved it, just as I had.
Some blamed the pandemic for the death of Casa Bonita in 2021. I’m not sure a global health crisis was required, though. Sooner or later, the weird synergy of inedible food and gimcrack entertainment was bound to founder on the reef of a half-century of deferred maintenance.
Stone and Parker were insane to take on a restoration — but I understand and salute their insanity. “What would I do with a ton of money?” is a favorite game of Americans, and “save Casa Bonita” would be high on my list, too. In Episode 107 of their fast-talking, cut-and-paste animated masterpiece, the “South Park” team immortalized the magnetism that Casa Bonita cast over children. American popular culture often asks: How low can you go? Casa Bonita answered lustily. The restaurant was too big, too loud, too garish, too sloppy. Too everything U.S. of A.
Casa Bonita's man-made, three-story indoor waterfall in January 2019. (Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post/Getty Images)Like the Rockefellers, Stone and Parker have rescued history by digging deep. A recent New York Times article recounted their project, tracking the expense of a new and better Casa Bonita from $10 million to $20 million to the number they finally settled on: “infinity dollars.” The new owners propose to serve good food from clean kitchens, to extract their divers safely from the pool without risk of electrocution, and to clean the floors every now and then. Radical stuff for the world’s worst — and most fun — restaurant.
I hope it works. Everything the new owners have poured their money into is stuff the target audience could not care less about. “The Disneyland of Mexican restaurants,” as Stone and Parker’s “South Park” kids called Casa Bonita, was built on madness, not mole. We live in a time when the food in many gas stations is better than the food served for half a century in one of the Denver area’s most popular restaurants. But is anyone the happier for it?
The things that made Casa Bonita a legend included delight, excess and permission — but not excellence. It was a place to be stupid, a place to overdo. It had no redeeming qualities, except joy. Good luck, saviors, in salvaging that. We need it.
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