There Were Four Other Casa Bonitas That Trey Parker and Matt Stone Couldn’t Save
Not only was the Lakewood, Colorado location of Casa Bonita just one of five restaurant/entertainment destinations that bore the name now best associated with South Park and its makers, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Casa Bonita wasn’t even the first Casa Bonita.
Today, Casa Bonita is a brand that’s far bigger than the already enormous, 52,000-square-foot scrawling megaplex nestled in the Denver suburb. Thanks to its current loving owners and the South Park episode named in its honor, the cliff divers and sopapillas of Casa Bonita are the stuff of legend to millions of fans across the world — many of whom have never stepped foot in Colorado or witnessed the wonder of Black Bart’s Cave with their own eyes. But when Parker and Stone themselves first stumbled into the pink cathedral of pageantry during some childhood birthday celebration many years ago, Casa Bonita Lakewood was a purely local attraction that few outside of the Denver area appreciated.
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However, when the South Park episode “Casa Bonita” first aired in 2003, it probably evoked bittersweet nostalgia from a great many grown kids from the Oklahoma area who know that, long before Parker and Stone turned Casa Bonita into a cultural phenomenon, they were there first.
The story of Casa Bonita starts with entrepreneur Bill Waugh, who built an all-you-can-eat Mexican restaurant that served sopapillas with every meal in Oklahoma City in 1968. The original Casa Bonita’s bottomless chicken and beef fare coupled with its family-friendly atmosphere made the restaurant such a hit that Waugh was able to rapidly expand the restaurant into a chain the very next year, when he opened a second Casa Bonita in Little Rock, Arkansas. Then, in 1971, Waugh turned Casa Bonita into a trio by launching another location in Tulsa.
The Casa Bonita that now enjoys a 600,000-person waitlist and hyperbolic praise from its early patrons was, in fact, the fourth Casa Bonita ever built and the final one to survive for more than a couple of years — e.g., the Casa Bonita at Hulen Mall in Fort Worth, Texas was only in operation from 1982 to 1985. But as is the case with so many businesses that were too pure for this world, the parent company of Casa Bonita sold out to a larger corporation in 1982, and the restaurants would change hands so many times and suffer so many poorly designed rebrands over the next couple of decades that, by the time South Park premiered in 1997, the original location was long closed and only Lakewood and Tulsa remained in operation.
The Tulsa location closed in 2005, two years after “Casa Bonita” aired, sadly unable to ride the wave of out-of-state interest that the episode generated for the then-chain. There were multiple attempts to re-open Casa Bonita Tulsa in the following years, but, by 2011, the dream was dead and only Lakewood remained.
As we all know, the Lakewood Casa Bonita that stands as the last surviving member of a once great Casa Bonita family nearly closed itself during the pandemic, but Parker and Stone swooped in to save the Casa Bonita name from vanishing. And now, $40 million in renovations later, Casa Bonita has never seen such worldwide interest in its offerings, and the brand is stronger than it ever could have been before.
Hopefully, once Parker and Stone recoup their massive investment in half a century, they will consider using the profits from Casa Bonita Lakewood to expand back into Oklahoma. Us South Park fans have been waiting for months to see the cliff divers and taste the sopapillas, but the Okies have been waiting decades.
