First and foremost: the rumors are true. Casa Bonita is a real place. And, not only is Casa Bonita a real place (6715 West Colfax Avenue in Lakewood, Colorado), but I have been inside its chambers. I have eaten there. I am a witness.
It has windows and walls and a roof. Inside there are tables and chairs. People work there—they receive paychecks with Casa Bonita printed in the left-hand corner. Casa Bonita, for all intents and purposes, exists: the word stemming from the Latin existere meaning to stand out. And Casa Bonita stands out: it is outstanding.
I know of the Casa’s existence, both Latin and English, because of the annual Association of Writer’s and Writing Programs conference, this year in Denver. The conference itself is a schmoozing boozefest, and man, is it the best. Aside from the hotel bar Manhattans, the off-site readings, and the awkwardness of writers—quite often anti-social and self-destructive people—being forced into situations where, you know, talking is involved, it serves as a reunion of sorts. I have many writerly friends who have left Alabama for bigger and brighter things. The AWP Conference is the one time each year when we can catch up/get drunk/dance at shitty clubs in a city that is not Tuscaloosa.
On a Wednesday at 6:45, my dear friend Alissa suggested that we grab a cab and head west to the shining suburb of Lakewood to experience the legend that is Casa Bonita.
Which is what Casa Bonita is to most—a place of legend. I, for one, was amazed that the place actually existed—I thought it fictitious: Gotham City, Yoknapatawpha County, Casa Bonita. The fictitiousness to which I am refering is, of course, an episode of Comedy Central’s South Park, itself based around a fictional town in Colorado. The episode, titled “Casa Bonita,” is about Eric Cartman not receiving an invitation to Kyle’s birthday party, which is to be held at what Cartman describes as his “favorite place in the whole world”, and his subsequent attempts to secure an invite—first through wearing a nice sweater (he mistakes wearing something nice for actually being nice), then by beating up Jimmy, then by finally faking nice in order to earn a spot on the birthday party waiting list—if anyone else can’t make it, he can go in their place, he says.
The rest of the episode is straight-up Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale—Cartman convinces Butters that the world is ending and hides him in a bomb shelter. As Cartman and company begin their trek to Casa Bonita, Kyle’s mom gets a phone call from Butters’ parents alerting her that Butters is missing. The episode ends with Butters being found at the South Park dump thinking that the world has been destroyed. Cartman, knowing that the cops are after him, tears through Casa Bonita in about 30 seconds before jumping off a waterfall a la Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.
And guess what? Black Bart’s Cave? The Bonita County Jail Cell? The sopapillas? The waterfall? They’re all there.
The actual Casa Bonita is not at all far-removed from South Park’s version. Founded by Bill Waugh in Oklahoma City in 1968, Casa Bonita is a chain—yes, there are (or were) multiple Casa Bonitas!—that had locations in Tulsa, Forth Worth, and Little Rock. The most successful location—the one in Colorado—opened in 1974 in what had been the anchor store in a strip mall. The other locations folded (though the one in Tulsa re-opened after a few years under new management—one has to wonder what is to be done with giant stucco castle real estate), but the Casa Bonita in Denver remains a glowing pink beacon in what has become a pretty sad area. If memory serves me correctly, it shares real estate with a low-end supermarket, a Dollar Tree, and a discount shoe store.
Of course, the surrounding blightedness is forgotten when you push through the giant wooden doors of the Casa and enter its decrepit bizarro wonderland.
The first thing you notice about Casa Bonita (aside from the fact that it takes forever to walk down to where you order food: the remnants of a time when they expected ridiculously long lines to get into the place) is the smell. It instantly brought me back to the snack bar at the Silver Saddle Swim Club back home in New Jersey. It’s two parts chlorine and one part Velveeta, and equal parts horrific. I, of course, knew about the cliff divers, which helped overcome the confusion caused by the initial blast of chemicals, but for the uninitiated, I imagine it’d be quite disillusioning to have the feeling you just walked into a YMCA.
Above all things, Casa Bonita markets itself as a restaurant. “The World’s Most Exciting Restaurant,” to be exact, but the word “restaurant” is used loosely. The food is simply the price for admission: everyone must buy a plate to be allowed into the Mexican jungleland emporium. It is a false-gift to whomever is the God of this place, a Huitzilopochtli with Mickey Mouse ears riding a skateboard, perhaps. It’s a smart business model; plates are around 11 dollars and are of sub-Taco Bell quality. Drowned in red sauce and liquid cheese, they look more like an infected wound than something to put into your GI tract.
Your dinner arrives on a conveyor belt through a small slit in concrete that is just large enough to allow your dish to pass—fortunately the weight of the sauce flattens the tortillas for easy clearance. Needless to say, you don’t go to Casa Bonita to eat—rumors of dumpsters of catfood tins behind the strip mall are the thing of legend in northern Colorado—and you don’t exactly go to drink either, though the margaritas are heavy on the tequila and you can order them by the pitcher, which, naturally, makes for a pretty spectacular feeling later on, assuming you can stomach the food (my friends Dave and Whitney ordered the kid’s chicken fingers; I surround myself with people more intelligent than I am).
The main attraction in the Casa Bonita experience is the 30-foot waterfall and The Sheriff and Bad Guy Black Bart shoot-em-up. Aspiring theatre majors act out a scene on a platform above the diving pool, usually involving some sort of gunplay: somewhat awkward considering the presence of young children, but chances are they are too busy shooting each other with laser guns or hitting each other with light-up swords purchased at the Gran Vista Casa El Mercado.
During our “dinner”, we witnessed three separate vignettes: one involving the pleading of a criminal, one a comedy involving Chiquita the Angry Gorilla, and one involving two men fighting over a woman. So, an anti-tragedy, an anti-comedy, and an anti-romance—obviously the folks in the Casa Bonita scripting department were deeply inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy. The plots of these perilous short stories were forgettable and simply served as a vehicle for the thrilling conclusion: someone was going in the water. Thanks to the hilarity of a series of false denouements, (at times I felt like Cartman: “Dive, asshole!”) you never really knew who was going in the drink, but the conclusion was inevitable. This is the “most exciting” part of the “World’s Most Exciting Restaurant”.
So, then, why would I go to Casa Bonita? I am not a child; I have no children. I’m certainly not an emetophile. Nor did I ever wonder what it’d be like to get drunk at a Mexican miniature golf course. Certainly irony and kitsch come into play; we went for the sake of saying we went, the same reason that draws us to roadside attractions and sad carnivals.
Ander Monson, in his excellent essay “Simulating: Emptiness” about his trip to Medieval Times explains, “We needed these spectacles. We still need these spectacles, apparently. Look at pro wrestling, mixed-martial arts fighting, boxing, Black Friday, the race of early adopters all holding up their hard-won iPhones. Look at any sport: competitive eating, American Gladiators, bocce, the biathlon. Any human endeavor. We want entertainment. And we want some semblance of reality. Hence memoirs. Hence reality TV. Hence neoprene faux-chain mail and live action role playing. We are born to play a role. We know it rules.”
This is true of Casa Bonita as well—we are members of a spectacle, a spectacle we are actively and passively participating in. There are puppet shows and magic acts, cliff divers and mariachi bands, all within a romanticized Mexican architecture, this strange vision of foreign paradise. When we raise up our little white flag (to surrender ourselves, perhaps?) in order to call our bolo-tied waiter so that we can have some sopapillas, we are participating in the methods and process laid out by this Leviathan hacienda. Welcome to the Casa Bonita, the Beautiful House, the city-state, the only home you’ll ever need. We have skee-ball, we have Time Crisis 2, we have Manx Super Bike TT, whisper whisper whisper.
These theme-restaurants, like the Rainforest Café, Hard Rock Cafe, and the Jekyll & Hyde Club, are distinctly American: no double kisses on cheeks, no hard to pronounce menu-items, and even if you butcher the Spanish pronunciations, señor, no one will bat an eye. One of my favorite nuances of the show Arrested Development is that Charlize Theron’s character, the British Rita Leeds, lives in the Wee Britain section of Los Angeles and only wants to eat at Fat Ammy’s, the American style restaurant.
Casa Bonita is no different. In fact, it might be the most American place I’ve ever been to in my life. One of Casa Bonita’s slogans is “Taste the Magic of Mexico” and ads boast that the inside of the restaurant is meant to look like a Mexican Village at night. For extra authenticity, the fountain that adorns the front of the restaurant (it was not operating when I went—perhaps it was too cold) was shipped in pieces from Mexico.
And that’s just it: having small pieces of a culture or concept and stamping it as authentic is as American as Yankee Doodle Dandy. Granted, no one goes to Casa Bonita thinking it’s a legitimate replacement to hiking through the Sierra Madre del Sur—the same way that ordering take-out from a Chinese restaurant that has a red paper lantern doesn’t make it more or less authentic. It seems as if Americans enjoy being inspired by other cultures but believe that we can improve on the concept. Sometimes we do alright, other times we get Casa Bonita and the Jersey Shore “guido”—American concepts that have found the Pierian spring, had a small sip, and claim expertise. It makes me consider the atrocities of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, scheduled to go into effect at the end of July, which allows police officers to demand anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant to produce papers proving US citizen status. Why would we want more Mexicans in our country? We got you guys figured out! Look at the 85-foot pink tower! We have a statue of Quahuatomec! We have tasted the magic of Mexico: it was delicious, please don’t come here and cook for us—we got this on lock. We will staff this place with sad-eyed Axe-bodysprayed suburban teenagers. We will teach them the importance of hard work and the American dollar. Our children will throw up on the walls of Black Bart’s Cave. They will swing at piñatas. Of course, the end is as predictable as the sheriff’s deputy getting wet: at some point, Casa Bonita will cease to exist, we will lament its passing and our loss—the loss of our childhood, the awareness that in this day and age, a Mexican-themed silk-plant queso-warehouse simply cannot survive only on hopes and dreams and refried beans. The death, then, of the most American Dream in the history of American dreaming.
Or maybe, just maybe, no one will fall into the swirling pool and Casa Bonita will be the last standing pillar of Mex-America: our only link to neighbors that reside over that fence over there. Anti-tragedy, anti-comedy, anti-romance. One can picture our ancestors unearthing the remains of this “beautiful house”: the gorilla costume, the claw machine, the sour cream caulk gun, and finally, they will be able to understand the legend of our country, these purple mountains majesty, these real live nephews.
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Ah, Casa Bonita. I lived in Denver for 12 years and, thankfully, avoided the place. Of course I lived in San Francisco for 10 years too and never made it to Alcatraz either. The only thing you really learn from such tourist traps is what the tourists are like, nothing about the people from the place you are visiting. Next time you’re in Denver try Benny’s in Governors Park, the food is good (I highly recomend the carnitas plate) or for neuvo mexican try the upscale Hacienda Colorado on Colorado blvd and I-25. But for the money, I like the food, margaritas, and vibe at Benny’s. And your cab ride will be much cheaper.