44 WESTWORD FOOD & DRINK 2023 Mi Casa I LOVED IT IN CHILDHOOD, AND I LOVE IT TODAY. BY LAUR A S HUNK In 2018, when my now-husband Rob and I were looking for a wedding venue, he suggested Casa Bonita with barely a trace of irony. “Come on,” he said when I raised an eyebrow. “There’s nowhere else like it!” That was Rob’s primary criteria for a venue — something weird and wonderful that would set the stage for an epic party. Plus, he pointed out, maybe if people started having parties there, it would survive. He had a point: The Pepto Bismol-col- ored palace of Acapulco-inspired dinner entertainment had certainly seen better days. A couple of years earlier, I’d celebrated my 31st birthday there and left feeling, well, kind of sad. The place was mostly empty; the live entertainers warbled off-color lines into a broken microphone; and the whole place could best be described as saturated — with grime, with the overwhelming musk of chlorine and disinfectant, with gauzy mem- ories of a heyday that seemed long gone. The patrons were like Rob and I — peo- ple who were willing to overlook all manner of sin because of a rosy nostalgia for the Casa Bonita of our youth. I eventually put my foot down on having the wedding there (I couldn’t get my mind around serving off-brand Velveeta), but I did agree to take our out-of-town guests during a tour of our favorite Denver spots; Casa Bonita was sandwiched between the Clyfford Still Museum and a brewery. Rob instructed everyone to order the taco salad before buying out the glow stick vendor’s entire collection. Our guests’ reactions ranged from mild amusement to complete bewilderment. Some friends bought us Casa Bonita Dive Team shirts to commemorate the event. Nobody liked the food. At that point, it was diffi cult to imagine that Casa Bonita would rise again to become the hottest table in town. But here we are, fi ve years later, with a virtual queue in the tens of thousands, and with the details of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s multimillion-dollar remodel sprin- kled tantalizingly across national news out- lets. South Park probably single-handedly sustained the place longer than it should have, with fans and lookie-loos making a pilgrimage despite its decline. Now Stone and Parker are promising that they’ve re- stored it to its original glory. And it was once truly glorious. It was a restaurant erected for a different era — one where your parents would kick you outside in the summer and say, “Be home by dark.” Casa Bonita was a similar kind of choose-your-own-unsupervised adventure: Your parents would sit at a sticky table sipping soda from a translucent red plastic cup, and you and your gang of sib- lings and friends would explore the caves, grottoes, arcade games and kiddie enter- tainment. Eventually, some vague sense of not having seen your family for hours would set in, and you’d try to fi nd Mom or Dad to make sure they hadn’t decided to leave you with the cliff divers forever. Were they near the wishing well or the palapa? How do we get out from behind the waterfall again? Quick! Avoid the charging gorilla! The food was also less out of place in the 90s — and we cared more about picking the color of our tray and silverware roll-up (red, green or blue) than we did about which processed-cheese-covered entree we would eventually eat. We all knew that once we hit the table and raised the fl ag, we would be fi lling our sopaipillas to the brim with honey, anyway. And speaking of tables, we’d beg the host — a gatekeeper with a headset — for one in the grotto so we could better see the performers nail ten-point dives into the tiny pool below while we ate. Once fi nished, we traipsed through Black Bart’s Cave, screaming when we touched the roaring skeleton, marveling at the glowing gems, and sprinting over the bridge to avoid the hands of the older kids hiding beneath to grab our ankles. We’d take in the puppet show and the magic show; the latter is still the only time I’ve ever seen a magician pull a rabbit from a hat in real life. We’d eventually try to win enough tickets in the arcade to purchase a really good prize — usually settling instead for a bouncy ball and a couple of plastic jumpy frogs. Then we’d be dragged from the place by our parents, our departure made easier by the treasure chest full of candy awaiting us near the exit. At least I think all of this happened: The weird nature of Casa Bonita means my memories feel supremely unreliable. When I returned to Casa Bonita in my twenties, that bridge in Black Bart’s Cave seemed to have been long since (and perhaps al- ways) fi lled under with cement that would preclude any ankle-grabbing. When I was tapping family members for memories for this story, Rob said, “Remember how hard it was to fi nd the mine?” I said, “What mine?” Regardless, for at least three decades, Casa Bonita was the un-ironic pinnacle of family dining and entertainment in this town. I was actually a second-generation Casa Bonita-goer in my family: my father patronized the place as a teenager in the ’70s, and has similar childhood memories of its maze of rooms and cliff divers. He agrees with Rob that there was a mine, but can’t remember navigating Black Bart’s Cave. In adulthood, he was similarly amused and mildly disgusted by the place by the time he started taking my brother and me there twenty years later: “It was like the La Brea Tar Pits when you guys were kids,” he remembers. “You’d put your foot in a certain spot and wouldn’t be able to get it unstuck.” But the food, he agrees, wasn’t branded as abysmal until my generation of Food Network snobs reached maturity. Like most families we knew, we cele- brated birthdays and ends of school years there, and visited after big soccer tour- naments or choir concerts. It was a do- not-miss destination for our out-of-town guests, put up on the pedestal right along with the snowcapped Rocky Mountains and the Denver Mint — Casa Bonita slowly started to reopen in June. MOLLY MARTIN continued on page 46
