The Casa Bonita Documentary Sidesteps the Restaurant’s Biggest Controversy

While securing reservations to Casa Bonita is about as easy as scoring front-row tickets to an alien autopsy performed by Taylor Swift, at least we can all get a taste (not literally) of what it’s like to visit the novelty Mexican restaurant, thanks to the new documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!.

The acclaimed doc is now available on Paramount+, the streaming home of South Park and Frasier Crane’s nonstop bullshit. It’s certainly an entertaining and funny account of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s efforts to re-open the troubled venue, but it’s also surprisingly sincere and even heartwarming, ending on a bittersweet note that oddly parallels the classic South Park episode that made the restaurant world famous.

The doc also largely avoids the most highly-publicized controversy surrounding Casa Bonita 2.0: the issue of employee compensation. 

In some ways, this omission may not be all that surprising, considering that ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! was made by Parker and Stone’s longtime collaborator, Arthur Bradford, and more cynical viewers could view the entire movie as nothing more than a 90-minute commercial for the $40 million plus venture. But the doc also very much presents itself as a warts-and-all version of this audacious story. It doesn’t shy away from showing how truly disgusting the state of the restaurant was before it was bought, how hectic and last-minute some of the renovations were, and how financially foolish the project was to even attempt. 

Which makes it all the more glaring that the movie side-steps a significant chapter in the Casa Bonita story that made headlines last year. In June 2023, Casa Bonita announced that it would ban tipping from the restaurant, and instead, it more than doubled the hourly wage from $14.27 per hour to $30 per hour. 

According to a restaurant spokesperson, this unorthodox strategy wasn’t originally the plan, and was only implemented after their “soft-opening nights” found that customers weren’t tipping due to Casa Bonita’s “unconventional, pre-pay ticketing system.” “Of our 256 employees, 93 were a part of the shift and a total of two were unhappy about it,” management claimed at the time. 

Well, that wasn’t totally true, it turned out. A lot more than two people were unhappy. Several workers formed a group called “We Are Team Casa,” issuing a list of demands to management, which included “a mutually-agreed on tip pool structure with input from all staff members.” They also weren’t above using South Park memes to get their point across.

While $30 an hour may sound like a generous pay bump, bartenders pointed out that the “bait-and-switch” pivot to a no-tipping policy meant taking a pay cut of “up to 40 percent” having been previously promised pay “in the $40-to-$50-per-hour range, with tips included.” And the $30 was just for bartenders; reportedly servers were set to make $28, with bussers and guest services employees making less still. 

The tipping was just one of many points of contention. Workers stressed that the reduced hours of the restaurant’s “beta testing” phase meant that they were only being scheduled to work “between 12 and 15 hours a week,” despite the fact that they “were told to quit their other jobs in order to be available to work at Casa Bonita full-time.” The group also alleged that employees had been “unfairly terminated” due to “contract-related disputes.”

And while it’s easy to say that Casa Bonita’s pay scale was arguably far more generous than the average restaurant, it also isn’t just another restaurant. As Eater pointed out, following the Parker and Stone purchase, Casa Bonita became a part of a business portfolio that also includes “a $500 million cartoon that produces roughly two hours of new content per year, a $900 million streaming deal and a $750 million Broadway show that continues to make about a million dollars each week.”

¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! briefly acknowledges that employees, especially those who quit their jobs to work at Casa Bonita, were pretty stressed out by the re-opening delays. But most of the film’s focus on worker discontent involves the restaurant’s performers, who become frustrated by Parker’s creative perfectionism as he continually overhauls the restaurant’s narrative infrastructure, which, clearly, wasn’t the most dominant problem facing workers.

Regardless of how you feel about the employees’ demands, it was certainly a noteworthy moment in the restaurant’s recent history that deserved some screen time. And given that the debate between tipping versus paying a living wage for service workers is very much in the zeitgeist right now, it would have been invaluable to see one of the most public examples of that economic discourse play out.

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