A cultural phenomena 🍽

Whether deserved or not, Casa Bonita is legend. You have to go at least once. So make the most of the mayhem whenever your ticket arrives.

Come along for a ride with me. Don’t buckle in.

Casa Bonita is the person from the online dating platform who drags you out so long before meeting that you eventually lose interest — but you still take the date when they finally make time, just to find out.

At least that’s how it felt to me, considering I took the first tour of the place in May 2023, before it grand reopened, and I didn’t get off the forever long waitlist to book seats until January 2024. We finally dined in mid February. By then, so many other folks had been and shared photos and impressions that I came to think my experience would be old news regardless of how it went. (I took heart in friends and Side Dish loyalists telling me they did want to know what Schnip thought of the place.)

Nevertheless, here I am with my unique critique and the necessary disclaimers. Firstly, I must identify myself as a first-time Casa Bonita visitor. I didn’t grow up in Colorado and didn’t hear about the place until college here, when a CC pal mentioned it from his upbringing. A couple years after we graduated the Southpark episode premiered and I vaguely remember the hoopla. Flash forward to modern history and I tuned in mainly as a work duty, tracking the big food and drink news event as any responsible journalist would. Point being I have zero sentiment and emotion attached to the place. Though I’ve learned enough to know that many people do.

I happened to talk one this very morning as I prepared to write this. I was in a coffee meeting with Rasta Pasta’s Rebecca Taraborelli and when I mentioned Casa Bonita her face lit up and she professed her lifelong love for it. So naturally, I dove in and interviewed her. (← Did you catch that veiled waterfall reference there? Pretty splashy, right? Oh and a pun to boot?! How dare I?)

Rebecca tells me that as a Springs kiddo, she went annually. “It opened in ‘73, the year I was born, so we grew up together… It smelled like piss in the corners and the food was covered in this terrible Cheez Whiz and it was creepy, but we loved it!”

I try to ignore the cognitive dissonance that sentence invites, interpreting it in my head as ‘so it’s like good-bad or ‘bad good’ or whatever. But she elaborates: “It’s like when you go to Water World, and it’s awful, but you still go.” (My boy brain interpretation: ‘so it’s like punching yourself in the nuts, and it hurts like all hell, but you do it anyway, with glee.’)

My girlfriend later confirms. “It used to be like this dilapidated Chuck E. Cheese, you know, like where the animatronics don’t quite work right … but the kids loved it.” She grew up between California and Texas before moving here in 2012, and initially didn’t know Casa Bonita was real when she saw it on Southpark. Once she got wise, they went — more than once. (Huh? What is it about old Casa Bonita sucking so hard that people couldn’t get enough, right up until the Covid pandemic closure?)

No I’m not.

Rebecca finally makes sense to me when she calls Casa Bonita a “cultural phenomena,” which at least captures the collective delusion. “We were so proud when it was on Southpark — that the world finally understood what we understood.” Now she takes her kids. She appreciates the absence of Cheese Whiz. She says they make a hell of a margarita. “And it’s clean now.” Seeing it from her adult point of view now, she says, “they say you can’t go back again, but I did, and it was better.”

Shit. I’ve just hijacked my own story with Rebecca’s story. Back to mine: I reserved four tickets for me, my girlfriend and her now-older teenage kids to hit up lunch one Saturday. Total cost (pre-drinks and entertainment on-site): $209.73, which included $10 extra for “flex” tickets that allow you to move the date if needed, but not obtain a refund. It felt like purchasing travel insurance just to go out to eat. (Read: Kinda silly annoying but necessary just in case, since they expect timely arrivals.) Consider how much money Casa Bonita will make this year on that feature alone. (I bet they store that treasure somewhere deep in Black Bart’s Cave.)

Anyway, we do the thing. We leave early to drive up, wait our 10 or so minutes in line outside queuing to get in through the metal detectors. We go through the cattle line to order our food and walk down the prep line to watch it be made and meet up with a runner at the end who escorts us to our table in an area designed to look like a mine shaft. Every few minutes someone else’s dumb kid plays on this installation of a dynamite detonator wherein it either explodes and the whole room rumbles with theatric effects or an audio clip plays with an exaggerated hillbilly voice saying “not another dud!”

A carnival-esque Love Tester machine around the corner from our table reads my palm and lights a red bulb next to the word “jealous” before spitting out a ticket that informs me: “Love is like a pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.” On the backside of the ticket it says “ Casa Bonita - The Greatest Restaurant in The World.”

Eh. Rebecca might accept that, but I’m skeptical. Let’s eat… while listening to a rendition of “Für Elise” on the banjo!

From the seven available entrée items — that’s it, it’s a quite limited menu — we go for the chicken mole, chile relleno, Beef Suadero and carnitas tacos (the item everyone before me said to get). Note once you’re seated you can buy extra entrée items (sans side rice and beans and cabbage salad otherwise included) for a fair $9. And when you’re ready, dessert additions are $8. Cocktails and wines are $13 and beers are $6-$9.

We’re presented with complimentary salsa and chips and the salsa’s as boring as Casa Bonita’s waitlist is long. Incidentally, urban lore has that list at a million people deep, but last time I asked the PR people about it they wouldn’t provide a number. According to this fresh Denver 7 report, Casa Bonita Chef/Culinary Partner Dana Rodriguez puts the number at 400,000 to 600,000.

Clockwise from top left: carnitas, Beef Suadero, chile relleno, mole negro.

In contrast to that salsa, the house hot sauces are actually pretty perky and bright despite not packing much of a punch. So ask for some with your meal. I first fork into the rice and beans to take a litmus test and am not encouraged — they’re serviceable at best. Oddly, the rice aroma evokes hay bales and the indoor giraffe area at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.

Having had a pretty great mole negro just days prior to my visit, I’m not impressed by this version. It’s okay, dark and muddy and sesame seed flecked and the pollo’s moist enough, but the spices like anise are fairly muted; it’s please-all safe. Still, after a couple bites, the kids tell me this food is “1000-percent” improved from that of the old days. It’s basically on par with standard chain Mexican restaurants now or the average local gut-bomb spots.

That’s further evidenced by the Suadero, non-fatty beef brisket in a tart salsa verde. It reads more like pot roast. The relleno meanwhile totally surprises us a light vegetarian (and GF and vegan-optional) item devoid of the typical excessive cheese melt inside. The poblano’s not all battered and fried to hell either, instead baked with a healthier calabacitas filling that includes cauliflower and corn and smothered in an acidic tomato sauce topped in asadero cheese crumble and a thick drizzle of crema. Definitely make this one of your choices, or a $9 add-on.

And yes, everyone’s right about the carnitas being a legit-good menu item. Sure, they’re a touch overly salty, but the flavors and texture are on-point, with chewy, stringy meat threads and lightly charred edges. This time the salsa verde’s served in a ramekin on the side, versus on top like on the Suadero.

We enjoy a Mexican Firing Squad-spinoff cocktail named El Diablo, which subs blackberry syrup for the typical grenadine. I don’t enjoy accidentally (and repeatedly) dragging the long tail ends of my Casa Bonita wristband (that denotes me as 21+) though my food. I do appreciate how when you want anything you just raise the flag at the end of the table to signal staff; it prevents obsequious service and frees them up to run sopapillas all over the place.

We don’t fill up on those freebies (which are decent as puffy fried dough squares coated in cinnamon-sugar and honey) and opt to order a couple desserts. The spicy Mexican chocolate budino is basically a chocolate pudding with some spicy pepper heat in the finish; it’s good. I don’t expect or really want the whipped cream and barely-toasted marshmallow topping so I let the kids remove it. The Mini Carlota de Limon is a Mexican key lime ice box cake also served in a metallic pudding cup and garnished with a lime slice and pair of commercial Mexican Marias Gamesa cookies. We like the big sweet-citrus zing as a final flavor to depart the table with.

After dining you can stay as long as you wish to roam the building and take in the shows, arcade and gift shops. We work our way through the crowds to wander dark passageways, observe one of the divers, watch a few minutes of a puppet show and then Sorsoro’s magic show. (You can purchase The Insanely Mysterious Sorsoro Delux Magic Kit for $29.95 in the gift shop, alongside every other Casa Bonita-branded item you can think of, down to a metal dog bowl or snow globe.)

I don’t wish to elaborate much on this part because if you still haven’t gotten your invite and seen it, I’d rather not ruin any potential surprises — like the super creepy-ass, egg-head shouting baby statue posed like an archeological discovery deep in a cave. (Okay that’s one thingy spoiled, but there’s plenty more to find.) If there’s a remotely coherent narrative to be deciphered between the odd artifacts and surrounding attractions it’s all lost on me. It’s a bit of chaos and randomsauce all played up by hype and Casa Bonita’s enduring legacy.

I guess nobody said that to be a cultural phenomena, as Rebecca put it to me, you have to actually make sense. Just go with it. Have fun. Take the obligatory pictures with Cartman inside and in front of the Pepto-pink facade and fountain out front. Clap for the divers, magician and puppeteer. Eat your carnitas and sopapillas and hit up the shooting gallery.

Rejoice because this is the revived Casa Bonita restored to a glory it never actually had before. Southpark fame (and money) has ensured it’s here to stay. The food’s not scary anymore and some items are solidly respectable.

While the Rebeccas of this world might make annual pilgrimage — if the waitlist filters them through fast enough at the 700-dining-seat capacity — others will be satisfied to experience the shtick once.

I would say that’s me. I’m glad I took the date and went to find out, and would probably be haunted by FOMO had I not. But there was nothing so spectacular that I want to go through the waitlist and stressful, be-there-on-time-or-else routine again. In a way, as I eluded to in the beginning of my story, I was over it before it began.

But that’s just me. I want to know what you think about your visit, if you’ve been: