This Family’s Homemade Casa Bonita Was A Lot Cheaper Than the Real Thing
Back in 2021, Trey Parker and Matt Stone made headlines for purchasing Casa Bonita, the beloved Colorado novelty restaurant that became world famous thanks to a police showdown with a 10-year-old child. Thankfully, that was just a cartoon.
The South Park creators claimed to have spent “infinity dollars” renovating the wacky eatery, which was in rough condition when they began work on it. But one family brought Casa Bonita back to life, prior to Parker and Stone, for a whole lot less.
As reported by The Denver Post, when the restaurant shut down in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Waller family was forced to cancel their annual trip to Casa Bonita. “It’s a joke obviously because the food there was or is less than appealing, so it’s like, once a year whether you need it or not, you go and have fun at Casa Bonita,” Quinn Waller told the post.
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Quinn and her husband Brent Waller decided to surprise their kids by turning their home into Casa Bonita, minus the overpowering chlorine smells.
The couple transformed the basement into Casa Bonita’s Black Bart’s Cave “using tarps and blankets.” After donning wigs and showing the kids to their table, the couple served sopapillas from a Mexican take-out restaurant. They even tried out Casa Bonita’s dinner performance, re-enacting “the gorilla and the shoot-out fight.” And instead of cliff diving, they “did couch diving, so we would do somersaults into the couch,” Quinn Waller told The Post.
The kids, who were 12, 10 and 7 at the time, then got to explore Black Bart’s Cave, and the parents jumped out to scare them.
Keep in mind, this was back before the restaurant's Manbearpig days. Although Waller did stress that she wanted to check out Parker and Stone’s vision for the restaurant. “Everyone’s excited to go back and see it eventually,” Waller explained. “I’m so curious — obviously, they hired this big-name chef and whatnot — how the new is going to mix with the old.”
The makeshift pop-up was just for the family and just for the one night, hence why Casa Bonita never sued. While the photos of the homemade Casa Bonita may not be quite as impressive as the real thing, they do illustrate that the family had a great time doing it. And, again, they didn’t have to spend millions and millions of dollars renovating their house and making sure everything was up to code — although, to be honest, it doesn’t seem like “couch diving” would ever be quite up to code. `
