"Tonight!" they exclaimed.
Months after signing up for Casa Bonita's email list, I'd finally been sent a link to book a reservation for a night at the pink entertainment palace. To celebrate two years of dating, I decided to surprise my partner, Joe, with his first-ever Casa Bonita experience — but the night had other surprises in store, too.
It turned out that the couple, John and Sharron Lowe Church, have been married three times — to each other — during their 48 years together.
"You know, I'm ordained," the man with the banjo said. "I could marry you again right here, right now."
"We'll take you up on that!" my partner interjected.
Sharron quickly agreed. "It can be a double wedding!" she said.
And so, three minutes later, after some very non-traditional vows, the banjo player declared: "I, by the State of Colorado, by the Avenue of Colfax and the great, great land of Casa Bonita, hereby deem these two lovely couples to be wed."
We were gifted a blue rubber duck by the man's bantering partner, a woman playing the role of a captain. "What was your first date?" our impromptu officiant asked. "A Billy Strings show," Joe said, and the man immediately began playing "Dust in a Baggie."
The slow reopening of Casa Bonita after it was purchased and renovated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone has been a saga straight out of South Park. I had been among the very first to officially visit the revamped destination in late May, but I was there with just handful of other people, and while we did get to taste the food and tour the completely redone kitchen, it was hard to imagine what the place would be like in its fully functional state.
So when that email came through, I was excited to get a true Casa Bonita experience — and, admittedly, a little skeptical. The months-long, invite-only soft opening has been a frustrating process for many. And then allegations by employees who said they were blindsided by changes to their pay structure and were told to quit or sign new contracts when they spoke up were disheartening, too. Still, I had to see if the hype around Casa Bonita 2.0 was real.
After receiving the email with the link to buy tickets, the chosen have ninety days to book a reservation. Currently, hours are still limited, and available dates seem to open up on a rolling basis, two weeks out. I waited about three weeks before the spot I wanted became available.
The basic dinner experience — which includes admission, a meal, chips and salsa, one order of sopaipillas and a soft drink, is $39.99 for adults and $24.99 for kids ages three to twelve (children under three get in free). Lunch, which is currently only available on Fridays, is $29.99 per adult and $19.99 for kids.
A 15 percent service charge is also automatically added. For an upcharge, you can opt to reserve cliffside dining. There is a Flex Ticket option as well, so that you can change the date if needed (otherwise, the tickets are non-refundable). For two adults with cliffside dining and the Flex option, my total landed at $122.36 — just over $60 per person, which, considering I recently spent over $200 at a dive bar while playing trivia, seemed reasonable for my budget. If I was toting along a few kids, though, that total could get unrealistic pretty quickly. But then, I probably wouldn't have gotten married, either.
When we showed up for our 5 p.m. reservation on a Wednesday night, there was a small group of adults and kids waiting on benches outside. We walked up to the roped-off entrance, where our QR code was scanned, then showed our IDs to an employee who gave us pink bracelets that signified we could order booze.
Every guest walks through metal detectors before going inside. Those with regular reservations head to the updated version of the old cafeteria line — the food is now plated in front of you, Chipotle style, before you take your tray to your table. There's a separate window where you check in for cliffside dining; you're then escorted directly to your seats, where a server takes your order and delivers your food.
The food has been improved, but if that's what you're coming for, you're missing the point.
Molly Martin
We also downed a mezcal margarita and a paloma ($14 each), which were served less than a minute after we ordered them, thanks to the fact that all cocktails are pre-batched. Our server, who admitted there had been some rough patches through the opening process, told us that he was making good money now that hours have expanded. But then ManBearPig and his handler suddenly showed up at our table, and we were distracted from asking further questions.
We raised the flag for sopaipillas after finishing our food, and an order of four arrived pre-doused in honey (you'll get packets if you ask for extra). Before the remodel, never-ending sopaipillas were essential because the rest of the food was nearly inedible, but two apiece was totally satisfying after actually eating a full meal.
One round of sopaipillas is included; more will cost you extra (but the "wedding duck" was on the house).
Molly Martin
From there, we grabbed another round of cocktails from one of Casa Bonita's several bars before waiting in a very short line just outside the gift shop to get a free caricature drawing. "Our wedding photo," Joe joked. A man behind us in line was visiting from Oklahoma City with his wife and kids — he'd managed to score tickets via a post he saw online from a stranger who'd gotten the link but wasn't able to make it in.
We swung by the arcade and passed through Black Bart's Cave. "This is exactly how I remember it!" said a woman behind us. While there were enough guests inside to make it feel full of energy, it wasn't overcrowded.
There are little surprises in nooks and crannies throughout. We found Cartman seated at a table upstairs and posed for a photo before making our way to the museum that runs through the entire history of the place. "I'm gonna send a picture to my mom. She loves South Park!" I heard a man nearby say.
We ended up spending three hours at Casa Bonita and still didn't see and do everything; we'd missed the tarot card reading and the puppet show. Joe and I agreed that we'd definitely go back again, and probably wouldn't even wait for our anniversary.
"Everything on the inside except for the shows was basically the same," Sharron said when I called her the next day. (We'd exchanged contact info after she offered to send me our "wedding video.") "The diving show was more classy than before, and this is the first time I remember anyone approaching the table."
Casa Bonita originally opened in Denver in 1974, and Sharron says her first visit was that year or the next. She estimates that over the ensuing decades, she and John had been there thirty to forty times before it shut down during the pandemic; visiting the pink palace was something of a family tradition.
About two years ago, John started the Casa Bonita Family Fan Page on Facebook. "He mainly just did it for our family to collect pictures that we had from Casa Bonita," Sharron told me. But now it has over 66,000 members who post multiple times a day — one post even got 495,000 views.
Sharron and John currently live in Georgia, but were in Colorado on a road trip when we met. When they landed in Denver, "I sent a note via a patron that had a reservation," Sharron recalls, sharing info about John and the fan page. "I told them we were outside in the parking lot in our motor home, and asked if we might be able to come in to just take some pictures." That person delivered the note to a Casa Bonita manager, who "called us within forty minutes and apologized, saying they didn't have room to let us in that night," she says. But the manager did come out to deliver some sopaipillas and a few treats from the gift shop. "She told us, 'I want you to see what hospitality looks like,'" Sharron says.
The manager also snagged them a reservation for a couple of weeks later, the night we ended up meeting the couple, and they rearranged their road trip to make the date. "It really was true hospitality,' Sharron says.
"We thought the food was fine," she adds. "But you go in there for the nostalgia."
And she's right. Even Joe, who had never been inside Casa Bonita before, felt the childlike wonder that the place encourages. The key to a good experience there is to be open to surprises and to not get hung up on how much it costs or whether the enchiladas are the best you ever had.
When you've spent three hours smiling and laughing (and maybe even getting unexpectedly married), none of that matters very much.
