Documentary of the Week: ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! (2024)

Every American has "their" Mexican restaurant. The one within a five mile radius of your house. We each have our own criteria, but they often provide a fairly inexpensive meal that starts with some chips and salsa and ends with a quarter-priced gumball or peppermint patty. Growing up, mine was called El Toreo and my mother and I went every other Friday night for years. We got to the point where the waiters didn't even bring us menus. My Combo #1 came with a taco, burrito, and rice, which I would pair with a Coke served in a red plastic tumbler. Chips and salsa were a must, while white sauce was an occasional delicacy.

In Lakewood, Colorado, a Denver suburb, that restaurant is Casa Bonita. But it's better than El Toreo in every way. The last time I was at El Toreo, the entertainment consisted of bull-riding on the tv. At Casa Bonita, the entertainment consists of cliff divers, costumed characters, magic acts, and puppeteers. The food, always bad, was secondary to the theme park ambiance - the restaurant itself is a maze of decor and distractions. Its reputation as a wtf-oddity made it a hit among regulars and obvious fodder for South Park, the Colorado-set show from locals Matt Parker and Trey Stone.

When Casa Bonita closed during the pandemic, the owners filed for bankruptcy. Always down for a good bit, Parker and Stone bought the restaurant. They planned to give it a bit of a makeover with a tad of modernization while keeping it as wonderfully shitty as possible. Their renovation budget started at $6 million, as they foolishly thought that it just needed a new coat of paint and a deep clean. They had absolutely no idea that the property was barely standing, rarely inspected, never renovated, and, at worst, deadly. To say that the whole place was being held up by duct tape would be an insult to the strength of duct tape. As they uncover more and more issues with the building, awkwardly laughing about how close years and years of countless employees were to accidental death, the renovation budget balloons by millions and millions. It's over $20 million before they've even caught all of the issues, and in a single conversation, it grows from $30 to $32 million.

By the time they reopened Casa Bonita, they had spent over $40 million on a complete overhaul, from the building to the business operations to the menu to the entertainment. The documentary, initially conceived as an HGTV satire of sorts, eventually becomes what Parker described to one outlet by saying, "Have you ever seen Kitchen Nightmares? It's the very, very worst one of those you could possibly ever imagine.”

Because the money doesn't really matter to the duo, it's all obviously frustrating but they just laugh it off. I've never been a big South Park fan, but these two guys are undeniably funny and watching them giggle and shrug off some of the grossest and most dangerous stuff you've ever seen got me every time. At one point, Stone even says, "No one would have done it like the way we did it - because it didn't make any sense and it wasn't smart."

I also loved how invested everyone was in the restaurant's reopening. In between the behind-the-scenes stuff, it keeps cutting back to the local news being like, "BREAKING NEWS - CASA BONITA STILL CLOSED, CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT?" as the renovation gets delayed and delayed. When they announce a May 2023 reopening (a deadline they were inevitably not going to make), people start using vacation days at work to sit in the parking lot during the last few days of the month, just in case the front doors open unannounced. For them, this is a lot bigger than just some restaurant next to a Dollar Tree.

They do eventually get the place open and it's just as perfectly crappy as they wanted. A half-assed Google search shows that it hasn't been without its problems since, diehards still haven't been able to get a reservation and there have been issues with employee pay and safety.

I just really got a kick out of this whole thing, partially because I've actually been to Casa Bonita. I have extended family in Colorado and on one trip, we had dinner there. I was a kid so I only barely remember it, but I do remember being amazed by the cliffdivers. Now I really want to go back, one recent Tripadvisor review even goes as far as to say, "The food was better than we expected." Wow, what praise!