Renovating Casa Bonita Made Colorado Feel Like Home Again for Trey Parker and Matt Stone

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone say that haven’t felt this close to their home state of Colorado since they first left the Denver area for New York in order to become big-shot TV writers, producers and stars in the late 1990s, and it’s all thanks to some sopapillas, a few cliff divers and a $40 million investment.

It’s fair to say that nobody is more devoted to Casa Bonita than its current co-owners, and the duo has the contractor invoices to prove it. Back in 2021, Parker and Stone finalized a deal to acquire the struggling Lakewood, Colorado restaurant and family entertainment megaplex for $3.1 million, but the South Park duo quickly found that the state of disrepair at the sprawling, 52,000-square-foot cathedral was very close to death-trap territory, and they’ve spent the last three years lovingly gutting and reconstructing suburban Denver’s closest equivalent to Disneyland in order to keep the dream alive for the next generation of Colorado kids.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Parker and Stone discussed how the Casa Bonita rehab brought them closer to their home state than they’ve felt in over a quarter-decade, and when the restaurant officially opens its doors to the public next month, it might even earn its owners a rare positive review from the Denver Post.

In addition to the ongoing Casa Bonita project, which the upcoming MTV documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! will detail when it premieres in select cities next week, Parker and Stone also made a triumphant return to their home state with the South Park 25th Anniversary Concert at the historic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado back in 2022. “It did feel like we were finally kind of welcome back home, because until then, it didn’t,” Parker said about his and his partner’s recent return to their roots, noting the rift between the South Park creators and the Colorado community first opened up with the release of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut back in 1999.

“Everyone in the country was super nice to us critic-wise except for people in Denver,” Parker recalled of the reviews to the first South Park movie. “It was more like, Who the fuck do you guys think you are?” However, the anniversary concert where he played all the show tunes that were initially panned by the Denver media drew a much warmer reaction.

While Parker and Stone say that they finally feel welcome again in their home state, that state has changed dramatically in the time they spent away from it. “It’s just so different culturally now with the internet and everything — there weren’t, like, sushi restaurants in Colorado,” Stone explained. “There, Casa Bonita just stuck out as this amazing place. There was nothing like it.” 

Nowadays, every a-hole from New York or California who relocated to Colorado during the pandemic has their favorite new brewery, climbing gym or, apparently, sushi restaurant in the Denver area, and the Patagonia-wearing citizenry of today’s Colorado aren’t quite the “humble folks without temptation” that Parker and Stone knew in the 1990s. But with Parker and Stone backing Casa Bonita, at least we know that Lakewood will never go the way of SoDoSoPa.