Metaphors, industry expectations, predictions of its demise – they all disappear into the deep fryer when it comes to Casa Bonita.
There are plenty of reasons why the beloved, Mexican “eater-tainment” concept is celebrating nearly a half-century of sopapillas, cliff-divers and surreal childhood memories in the west Denver suburb of Lakewood.
It’s the last of its chain, which once included outposts in Oklahoma and Arkansas. It’s a historical landmark in its hometown, as neighbors have gradually embraced its kitschy appeal since its 1974 opening to sell fine art, enamel pins and bumper stickers, among other products.
It offers a window into both past trends and the immersive, “experiential” art and entertainment on which the fast-rising, Santa Fe-based Meow Wolf is building a national empire. And how many other restaurants can boast an episode of “South Park” (2003’s “Mexican Disneyland”) based solely on them?
Casa Bonita (Spanish for “pretty house”) is vast, occupying 52,000 square feet with the capacity to seat more than 1,000 people. It’s wacky, with a 1970s-indebted Disneyland-meets-Las-Vegas vibe that includes everything from gun and sword fights (fake, of course) to skee-ball, puppet/magic shows, a labyrinthine cave, live mariachi bands and all manner of arcade and gift-shop distractions.
And no one who goes there can ever forget it.
“There are hipsters and ironic people who visit, but it’s mostly families and people who just enjoy going to one of the world’s weirdest restaurants,” said Andrew Novick, a Denver collector and filmmaker who has given hundreds of unofficial tours of Casa Bonita. “It’s so clearly not about the food. It’s about the experience. I’ve taken people who have been there a hundred times before, and I’ll show them stuff they’ve never seen.”
Novick, a metro area native, loves Casa Bonita so much he’s throwing a party and fundraiser for his 300th visit on Feb. 24, with 20 percent of food and drink sales going toward the Mariposa neighborhood’s Food Bridge International Marketplace. The event takes place in conjunction with the nearby NEXT Gallery’s second annual, Casa Bonita-themed “Pretty in Pink” art show (opening Feb. 22), which received dozens of submissions from painters, sculptors and experimental artists.
For the generations of people who have been going to — and working at — Casa Bonita, it’s more than a restaurant. Located at 6715 W. Colfax Ave. in the former Joslin’s Department Store, it employs upwards of 200 people during peak seasons, including summers and holiday breaks. Working there has become a rite of passage in some families.
“My mom actually used to work here, so I kind of got the job from her,” said server and manager Felicity Akers, 23, who has been at Casa Bonita for seven years. “We moved here from South Dakota when I was four years old, and Casa Bonita was my mom’s first job in Colorado.”
“When I first started, I was just looking for something temporary to fill in, because I was a commercial painter,” said Mary Simonsen, who has managed Casa Bonita’s arcade and its El Mercado gift shop for the last decade. “Maybe I just don’t know what temporary is.”
Casa Bonita’s 85-foot, 22-karat-gold domed tower, which is visible for miles around, may as well be a unicorn horn (it’s topped with a statue to Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor of Mexico). That’s why Lakewood gave the restaurant landmark designation in 2015: not for its fake palm trees, multi-tiered dining room or 30-foot indoor waterfall, but because there’s simply nothing else like it.
With the permission of Casa Bonita’s management, The Denver Post spent some quality time at the restaurant — both in front of and behind the scenes — to bring you this definitive guide.
The food
Casa Bonita’s menu is frozen in time, reflecting the Tex-Mex favorites that were popular during its 1974 opening: burrito, enchilada and taco platters that average about $15 each. But the most immediate thing about the food is that it’s essentially a cover charge.
“It’s like a carnival-ride line when you first walk in,” said Brian Stasiak, 32, who was visiting Casa Bonita for the first time from Chicago. “You’re going through this maze to get in here. It felt a little like (Six Flags) Great America.”
While mocking Casa Bonita’s admittedly basic, assembly-line dishes is a time-honored tradition, the food hasn’t changed because it continues to work for the restaurant.
“We’ll get seasonal bar drinks that will change, like themed margaritas when the Broncos are in the playoffs, but the menu’s been mostly the same,” said manager Akers. “My mom and I found a menu from when my grandparents came here when they were younger, and it was very, very similar.”
The single most popular (non-sopapilla) menu item is the enchiladas, in part because they’re included in most of the platters, followed by the fajitas, a newer addition. Casa Bonita goes through about 1.9 million enchiladas each year (beef, chicken and cheese), slathered in 9,000 gallons of red enchilada sauce, and flanked by 2,500 gallons of green chile, 86,500 pounds of rice, 52,000 pounds of tortilla chips and 9,500 gallons of salsa.
But, oh, those sopapillas. “South Park” character Cartman famously lusted after them, and raising a miniature red flag at your table tells your server to keep them coming. Casa Bonita sells 1.26 million of the deep-fried bread treats annually, with honey on the side.
Other players have jumped into the “eater-tainment” category over the years, from Chuck E. Cheese and Dave & Buster’s to the Punch Bowl Social, but Casa Bonita owns its niche.
“Nobody goes to the museum expecting to get something great to eat, and other than the fact that they force you to buy dinner, it’s the same way at Casa Bonita,” said restaurant consultant John Imbergamo. “The fact is that people go there because they’re entertained. The food is secondary.”
The cliff divers
Casa Bonita’s centerpiece, 30-foot-tall indoor waterfall is modeled after the cliffs of Acapulco and pumps 26,427,000 gallons of water per year, which supplies its 14-foot-deep pool from which cliff divers and actors plunge during the shows. Pirates, Old West gunfights, fire jugglers and a costumed gorilla fill the performance slots, which run every 15 minutes and repeat every hour and a half (see casabonitadenver.com/tour for daily schedules).
No other Colorado restaurant, and few anywhere else, has such an impressive water feature, and divers take their auditions and training seriously.
“It’s mainly high school and college kids,” Dalilah Gara, office manager at Casa Bonita, told The Denver Post last year. “But anyone who can do the dives is welcome to audition.”
The auditions include a front 1 1/2 somersault dive, inward dive, swan dive and back layout dive — not exactly child’s play, despite the way it delights onlookers of all ages.
“One of the things we have found is that our customers really like to know what to expect,” general manager Mike Mason told The Denver Post on Casa Bonita’s 40th anniversary in 2014. “We try to stay true to the formula.”
The decor
True to founder Bill Waugh’s original concept — which opened under the Casa Bonita name in Oklahoma City in 1968 — the restaurant takes its moniker literally.
Its pink exterior conceals a vast network of nooks and crannies inside. While the main, multileveled dining room is decorated with plastic palm trees and strings of lights, different facades and themed rooms invoke regional Mexican architectural styles, including the resort of Puerto Vallarta.
With so much of old Denver disappearing into redevelopment, Casa Bonita increasingly represents a more authentic, less gentrified notion of working-class Westerners, fans say. The irony is that the flood of legal-cannabis tourists and millennial college-grads hitting Denver in recent years has only helped to keep Casa Bonita afloat.
“You know what else is really cool?” said Yesenia Galvin, 31, who was visiting for the first time on a recent weekday. “The artwork that they have up is a lot of old Mexican styles and stage stars that you don’t see anymore.”
Trends have lapped Casa Bonita’s modest renovations so many times that one would be forgiven for wondering if the restaurant is sincere or ironic. However, on-site managers and current owner Robert E. Wheaton, of Star Buffet, Inc., have wisely declined to change any significant features or fixtures. That includes not just the fake windows and balconies of the interior facades but also the dark volcanic rock that surrounds the centerpiece pool.
“A lot of people don’t know that we decorate for all the holidays,” said manager Akers, shortly after maintenance workers took down the extensive Christmas decorations the first week of January. “The whole entire back area turns into a haunted house at Halloween.”
Casa Bonita feels authentic because it has remained true to its original concept, said gift shop manager Simonsen, as opposed to desperately chasing each new trend.
“People come in who haven’t been here in 20 years and it’s still the same,” she said. “I came here when I was little, I brought my kids in when they were little, and now they’re bringing in their kids. It’s always the way you remember it when you were here last.”
The maze of entertainment
In addition to its live entertainment, including a fully costumed mariachi band, Casa Bonita offers an upper-level arcade that spits out paper tickets (which can be redeemed for kiddie gifts) and a sprawling shop stocked with dozens of branded items (T-shirts, laser-engraved wooden lighter covers, novelty rocks). Notably, the arcade leans more toward Lakeside Amusement Park’s vintage and occasionally non-functional offerings than state-of-the-art digital gaming.
But perhaps the most memorable aspect, at least for kids, is Black Bart’s Cave. The dimly lit passage is designed to mimic a pirate’s cave and has inspired countless young visitors to dare their friends to navigate it solo (adults can also go in, too, but it’s a little tight).
A downloadable add-on to the 2017 “South Park” video game The Fractured But Whole recreates the space, and countless social media photos boast of surviving it, so enter at your own risk — or at least if you have a few minutes to spare between the nearby puppet and magic shows.
“We’re in this immersive economy now, but (Casa Bonita) has truly always been immersive,” said collector and fan Novick, who has taken touring bands like Melvins and the founders of Meow Wolf to Casa Bonita for local color and inspiration. “The Meow Wolf folks were marveling at the fine details of some of this stuff and saying, ‘How has this stayed here exactly the same for more than 40 years?’ ”
The pop-culture profile
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Another good question: How has a restaurant not known for its food been able to stay open for longer than most of its visitors have been alive? Casa Bonita puts little money into its marketing budget, despite a near-omnipresent profile in local media.
One explanation is “South Park,” the long-running animated series from former Colorado residents Trey Parker and Matt Stone that not only based an entire episode on the restaurant, but has continued to revisit and reference it in various ways over the last 16 years.
Casa Bonita! pic.twitter.com/rXDe8gnd8h
— Macaulay Culkin (@IncredibleCulk) July 17, 2018
Instagram culture and social media haven’t hurt, either, as Googling “Casa Bonita” turns up a wealth of bemused posts and imagery. “Home Alone” star Macaulay Culkin made a point to post about it during a 2018 visit; retired Denver Broncos players are frequent guests (according to staff); and large groups — whether they’re Comedy Central network executives, the staff of Water World, or the entire touring cast of “The Book of Mormon” — have been known to arrive in parties of up to 300.
Bands and comedians have also found it an ideal backdrop for their videos, with its colorful, faux-lush setting, which frequently resembles a tropical plaza.
“I want to play by some sort of rushing water, if at all possible,” quipped Ben Roy, singer of the punk band Spells and co-star of truTV’s Denver-set sitcom “Those Who Can’t,” before doing just that in a 2015 music video.
National and international tour guides continue to tout Casa Bonita’s unique pleasures, and with state and city tourism annually reaching new records (Mayor Michael Hancock credited Denver’s “hospitality tourism” for its 32 million visitors in 2017), Casa Bonita seems set for many more years of memory-making.
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