This Is How Many People Need to Eat at Casa Bonita for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to Make Their Money Back

Right now, more than 600,000 potential patrons sit on the waiting list for a table at Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s dinner entertainment megaplex Casa Bonita, but the South Park creators’ financial managers will be waiting even longer for their clients to turn a profit.

After purchasing the struggling business for $3.1 million in 2021, Parker and Stone quickly found that the crumbling infrastructure of the massive pink cathedral of cliff divers and sopapillas required a complete, painstaking and expensive renovation that has ballooned the cost of owning and updating Casa Bonita to “infinity dollars,” according to the two comedy legends. 

In actuality, Parker and Stone put the total of their investment into the passion project at around $40 million, money that could have been used to buy multiple private islands or, I don't know, make Team America 2.

While Parker and Stone have been insistent that the multi-year, multi-million-dollar renovation of Casa Bonita has all been worth it to bring their favorite childhood restaurant to greater heights than ever before, the wealth managers and business advisers in the duo’s employ must find this process even more painful and grueling than the South Park creators found the making their first political puppet movie. Because according to our calculations, even if all 600,000 waitlisted customers max out their reservation with a party of 10, the profits from those tables still wouldn’t come close to covering Parker and Stone’s massive investment.

Based on Casa Bonita’s pricing data and publicly available financial information on the Colorado restaurant industry, Casa Bonita would likely need to serve roughly 41,275,000 guests to break even, which would mean selling out both lunch and dinner services for 56 years, 6 months and one day straight. By then, even Cartman’s grandkids would be too old to spend a week in juvie over their Casa Bonita trip.

These calculations are contingent on the information put forth by the Colorado Restaurant Association, who claim that, for every one dollar of gross revenue that the average eatery in the Centennial state brings in, only three cents turn into net profit after factoring in labor, overhead and materials. Also, bear in mind that the median restaurant in Colorado doesn’t count cliff divers and puppet shows among its operating costs, so our numbers may be slightly too generous to Casa Bonita.

Right now, the restaurant charges $39.99 for an all-inclusive ticket to adults for dinner service and $24.99 for children. As is the case in the South Park episode “Casa Bonita,” the restaurant caters to families and is explicitly kid-friendly and kid-focused, so, for our purposes, we’re going to assume that the ratio of kids to adults who come to Casa Bonita is roughly 1:1.

The VIP Cliffside Dining option is also available at $60 per head for dinner service, but it’s unclear what percentage of Casa Bonita’s seating is reserved for the premium package or how popular the VIP option is among guests. In one of the bigger guesses of the equation, we’re going to spitball and say that 15 percent of all guests who eat at Casa Bonita will be both willing and able to splurge on the top-shelf experience.

Casa Bonita also offers lunch service (although only one day a week, currently) at $29.99 per adult and $19.99 per kid. It’s also not clear if the Cliffside Dining upgrade is available during lunch, but for the sake of this exercise, we’ll assume that it is at a similar discount when compared to the dinner version as is the price difference in the general admission. 

The Denver-area dining and entertainment magazine 5280 claims that Casa Bonita can host as many as 1,000 guests per dinner service when it’s fully operational, but as we all know, the restaurant still has no target date for a grand opening. However, for this experiment, we’re going to calculate Casa Bonita’s profit potential under perfect circumstances in which the restaurant is firing on all cylinders and selling out both lunch and dinner seven days a week.

So, considering the pricing options, the thin profit margins every restaurant faces and Casa Bonita’s maximum capacity, a full day of sellouts for both lunch and dinner may pull in only $1,938.24 in net profit after covering the aforementioned operating expenses, which means that Parker and Stone would need 20,638 days of perfect performance to recoup the initial investment.

But, hey, it’s still a better business model than Cartmanland.