By: Ernest Gurulé
For millions of Coloradans and tourists alike, an early holiday present! The ‘pink lady’ is back! Casa Bonita, the iconic landmark with the mysteriously tasting food and not-ready-for-primetime visual delights that has stood guard in a Colfax Avenue strip mall for decades, is being resurrected, given new life by a pair of Colorado natives and state icons in their own right.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of television’s ‘South Park,’ have signed the papers to become the new owners of the infamous and kitschy Casa Bonita. Of course, the new owners won’t open the doors until early next year. First, the landmark must undergo some serious renovations, renovations that thankfully include long begged and pleaded for upgrades to the restaurant’s dining options. (Spoiler alert: It’s the oodfay, folks.)
Like so many other things, COVID put a serious crimp on the Lakewood landmark forcing it to close and enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. For a time, there was concern that the virus and its impact on Lakewood’s answer to Paris’s Eiffel Tower or India’s Taj Mahal might simply go away. But Parker and Stone, the most unlikely pair, swept in and saved the day.
Coloradans have known the guilty pleasures of ‘La Casa’ since the seventies—cliff divers, Black Bart’s Cave, mariachi players and appetite-strangling food. But Casa Bonita had been largely unknown to the rest of the nation. That changed when the two Coloradans featured it promi- nently in episodes of ‘South Park.’
Since season seven, ‘South Park’s’ creators have regularly made Casa Bonita a key part of storylines in the long-running cartoon. Its first appearance happened in season seven when Cartman tricks Butters into disappearing in order to wrangle an invitation to Kyle’s birthday party at Casa Bonita. (The show’s rabid watchers need no explanation of the characters.) That episode and others featuring the rose-colored landmark accurately recreated the cheesy interior of the romanticized and Mexican-themed restaurant. Cartman’s high dive in that episode was a bonus.
“Pending bankruptcy proceedings with the owner,” said Stone in a sit down interview in August with Governor Jared Polis and his ‘South Park’ co-creator and partner, “this’ll have to happen in a couple of months. We have come to an agreement with the owner, and we bought it.”
At the announcement, even the Governor, no gastronomic expert or culinary snob, had to inquire—diplomatically, politely, deferentially—about the restaurant’s bill of fare. “We all love Casa Bonita,” he said before discreetly adding, “the one area where we’d all love to see an upgrade, I think I speak for everybody who patronizes Casa Bonita, is the food could be a little better. You’ve probably heard that.” And like most every diner who’s imbibed and never asked for seconds at the place, the pair offered no rebuttal.
Stone and Parker, with their own stories as both kids who experienced the place and now with children of their own children, kids who’ve also broken bread, er, tortillas, at the place, made the pledge to address the ‘ghost at the banquet,’ the no-star food quality.
They have not only hired on a new head chef, but a person with the chops to actually make Casa Bonita’s food not only edible but enjoyable. Dana Rodriguez will serve as the joint’s Executive Chef. Rodriguez is no lightweight in upper crust food circles, either.
Rodriguez, a three-time James Beard award nominee, will be reordering the menu and taking the food to places it’s never been before, from afterthought to appetizing.
In an interview with Denver’s 5280 Magazine, Rodriguez pledged to “change nothing and improve everything.” The new exec-chef had been forewarned of the restaurant’s dining legacy. “Obviously,” she told the magazine, “the food wasn’t great, and that’s something we all remember…We’re going to make everything one thousand times better, keeping the same essence. How to bring all my flavors from Mexico, that is the most exciting part to me.”
While Coloradans know Casa Bonita as a state landmark, it may shock and surprise, maybe even disappoint that that the restaurant is more ‘new original’ than the one and only. The gorilla and cliff divers that once were thought of as Colorado’s own, actually had doppelgängers in, of all places, Arkansas and Oklahoma—places better known for squirrel stew and sassafras than sopaipillas.
While Parker and Stone seem like last guess restaurateurs, all that changed over the summer when the pair signed an astronomical $900 million deal with ViacomCBS to take ‘South Park’ all the way to 2027 and create 14 ‘SP’ episodes exclusively for streaming on the Paramount+ streaming app. The money, dizzying by any definition, clinched the decision to buy Casa Bonita said Stone. In an interview with Bloomberg’s Screentime newsletter, he called the enormous windfall “‘expletive-you’ money.’”
Parker and Stone, who have lent their characters to big screens at University of Colorado sports events and Denver Bronco and Nuggets games says their nouveau riches won’t change the way they’ve done business since ‘South Park’ first appeared nearly a quarter a century before.
“We’ve been rich for a long time,” Stone told Bloomberg. “We have nice houses and cars. Even this giant deal won’t change my day-to-day (life).” What it will change, though, is the day-to-day lives of cheesy gorillas, college student cliff divers, work-a-day cooks and families who, despite the knowledge of truly horrible food, still have a place to go.
