Casa Bonita Is a Save Point
In which I consider the power of places, and what I have in common with Trey Parker
Last week I went to Los Angeles for work, and I was fortunate enough to have a night free to spend with my dear friend Claire. Claire kindly indulged me in going to see ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, a narrow-release documentary about South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone buying and rehabilitating an iconic Denver Mexican restaurant. I knew the film was something I’d enjoy, but what I didn’t count on was how much it would emotionally resonate with me. It got me thinking that Trey Parker and I have shared some core experiences that maybe not a lot of other people have, which in turn had me considering the ways I relate to places, and work, and dreams, which is what I’d like to expound upon in this post.
Disclaimer: If you read on, you’re going to have to accept that I am a person who very much enjoys South Park. I definitely don’t cosign on all of their social stances, but I do think the show is super sharply written, impressively timely, often thoughtful, and it’s made me cackle more than perhaps any other media. You’ve been warned! lol
Like a lot of people of my generation who didn’t grow up in Colorado, I first learned about Casa Bonita through the same-named South Park episode, which aired in 2003. This episode hit during my peak college dorm hang period; in my memory, my friends and I cram into my room every night to watch whatever’s on Comedy Central and play Texas Hold ‘Em (it was also a peak poker period for dudes our age). Because I was watching these episodes with folks who I consider best friends, this whole season of South Park is probably my favorite — in the same way that that era’s releases of Mario Kart (Double Dash) and Smash Bros. (Melee) are my favorite, because I had the richest opportunities to form emotional bonds with them.
Still, looking at a list of South Park’s season 7 episodes, I do think the show was really firing on all cylinders here. “Krazy Kripples,” “I’m a Little Bit Country,” “Lil’ Crime Stoppers,” “Red Man’s Greed,” “Christian Rock Hard,” “All About Mormons” — hit after hit after hit. “Raisins,” maybe my favorite episode of the whole show — which I’ve written about before! — is also part of season 7. And, of course, “Casa Bonita.”
Truthfully, though, “Casa Bonita” didn’t super resonate with me at the time; even at 19 years old, I felt strongly that “Raisins” was the standout of the bunch. But, if not an impression, “Casa Bonita” bookmarked a page in my brain that I would end up rereading a lot.
I don’t remember when I learned that Casa Bonita was a real place. It definitely happened by 2009, when a few friends and I decided to take a giant road trip from San Francisco to Chicago. Most directly, that trip’s route does not run through Denver, but we decided to detour from Cheyenne down to the Mile High City to see a college pal and, of course, visit Cartman’s favorite restaurant.
My pictures from that trip are, to be frank, horrible. I think I had a smartphone by then? But man, iPhone cameras have come a long way.
I’m afraid my memories of this visit are about as indistinct as my photos, but I do remember the emotional impact of going — it felt great. The food was engineered for comfort, but the environment for maximum stimulation. I mean, there’s an arcade, there’s caves to explore, there’s a stage, a cliff — it’s pretty much exactly what Cartman fantasizes about in South Park, and I loved it all. A friend recently asked me if the food was good (notoriously, it was not), and I answered that I remembered really liking it — at that age, I had barely had authentic Mexican food, so counter service Tex Mex with unlimited sopapillas felt wildly satisfying. But it’s the theatricality of the place that really puts it over the top impressions-wise. And this time, Casa Bonita made a much larger impression on me than just seeing it on TV did.
In the early 2010s, my core Chicago friends and I would often spend our nights at the Bucktown intersection of Milwaukee, Armitage, and Western Aves. This was the hub of our social lives; we’d eat at Korean fusion restaurant Belly Shack, drink at watering hole The Green Eye, and see shows at the upstart Gorilla Tango Theatre. It felt like this tiny chunk of the city was providing for us, nourishing us. My friend Ed came upon the metaphor of calling this area a Save Point — inasmuch as, if for some reason Ed felt depleted, he could return to this area to recover and get himself ready to get back out into the world.
Ed, like me, is a JRPG stan who cut his teeth on Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. I completely vibed with what he was saying, and this has become a metaphor I’ve continued to keep in mind as my own map of the world expands. With more of continent to explore, after all, it’s even more crucial to shore up your save points when you can.
The next time I visited Casa Bonita, it was in the context of the South Park video game The Fractured but Whole’s DLC pack “From Dusk till Casa Bonita.”
Truly, The Fractured but Whole is my second favorite tactical RPG of all time, after Final Fantasy Tactics, and I genuinely think it beats Tactics on the story front (look, the gameplay of Tactics is S-tier, but the script has way too many proper nouns and way too much Shakespearean language for me. I find it very difficult to connect to!).
Released in 2018, the Casa Bonita DLC throws you into a ridiculous story where Kenny recruits you to help him fight off vampire kids trying to “turn” his sister into one of them over the course of a birthday party. The final boss fight here is one of my favorites in all of gaming, and the reveal of the big bad had me losing my shit the first time I played (spoiler alert: even though the game refers to him as such, it’s not really Corey Haim).
Immersing yourself in a video game world styled after a real place has the strange effect of making you feel like you’re actually in that place. Or maybe, beyond that, video games with fully immersive environments make places feel real regardless of any corporeal precedent. There’s a great interview with comics author Grant Morrison (my favorite!) from 2010 where they talk about this precise phenomenon. Relevant excerpt below:
It occurred to me, immersed in my 50th hour of Just Cause 2, how far beyond that silent audience, proscenium arch, here's some well-paid 'actor' pretending to be someone else experience we'd gone and how very timidly other forms of storytelling entertainment had reacted to the challenge of the beast in their midst, this ultimate choose your own adventure playground that in some cases simulates 'life' and terrain so effectively it's like actually like going on vacation (how many gamers know the geography of Silent Hill as well as their own town? Do streets and locations from Liberty City, Panau, or Saints Row, turn up in the dreams of other gamers like they do in mine? I'll lay odds they do. These amazing virtual environments appear in my memories as real as Chicago or London. Paris, Venice, New Delhi, Jogjakarta or any of the non-CGI cities I've been to.
After soundly defeating “Corey Haim,” having only visited Casa Bonita a handful of times — a few times via a TV show, once in person, and once in a game — I felt like I understood the place on some real level. Maybe that was prophetic.
In the summer of 2017, I started working on the project whose creation and fall would come to define my professional life — Cards Against Humanity’s Chicago Board Game Cafe. The comparisons between that project and Casa Bonita feel pretty apparent, inasmuch as they both involved rehabilitating a derilict commercial space and turning it into an immersive, theatrical dining experience. We quite literally referenced Casa Bonita several times during the course of our buildout. I’m not saying our project quite aligned with the South Park guys’ work monetarily, but the multiplier between the two isn’t wildly large.
I oversaw a whole lot of the process of building out the game cafe, and let me tell you, watching ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, I recognized a lot of the same feelings weighing down Trey Parker in my past self — the anxiety of a ballooning budget, the hurry-up-and-wait stress of trying to hit an opening date, the wrangling of all sorts of talent, the existential questions of whether it’s all even worth it. That all resonated super hard with me.
A key difference is that, after opening their restaurant, Trey and Matt have been able to oversee more than a month of its operation. In fact, they just opened up reservations to the public for the first time, and swiftly sold out. That’s more than a year after their soft open, an invitation-by-lottery-only operation, which puts them at a full 16 months and counting.
You probably know the Chicago Board Game Cafe didn’t get that. We had three weeks of invitation-only, then a month of full open, and then the state of Illinois shut down restaurants to curb the spread of COVID-19 (which it was correct to do!). Then, a few months later, our CEO got canceled into oblivion, and I left. I ended up feeling like, knowing what I knew, I couldn’t (and maybe shouldn’t!) enjoy the place the way I wanted to. Three years of work on a project that I thought would be a terminal setting for my career, and I couldn’t be there any more. I took off for LA, and you probably know what happened after that.
Spoilers for ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! follow: I was surprised and moved to find that, in fixing up Casa Bonita, Trey Parker had somewhat of a similar arc to me. It’s not external factors that made Trey feel like he had to leave the restaurant, but more his own unease of “the South Park guy” overshadowing the joy and wonder of the restaurant he set out to revive. Because of that, the film notes that Trey doesn’t enjoy hanging out at his own place anymore, although he does still contribute creative ideas for it. Again, this was not my arc, but the parallels really got me. I felt like, for a moment, I found understanding with the wildly rich dude who cocreated one of the most influential TV shows of all time. And, more than that, I felt like ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! understood me.
Sidebar: It’s fucking weird that Cards Against Humanity is in the national news again — right before I typed this sentence out, I saw that they claimed the second story slot in today’s NPR digest. Like, I get it, and fuck Elon Musk for sure, but it’s strange to me how gleefully friends are sharing this story with me. It’d be like if your ex did something pretty rad (but explicitly calculated for their own PR) and then all your friends were like, “whoa, they’re so awesome!”, forgetting how much they hurt you. Which, honestly, some of my exes deserve that press way more than CAH. So it goes.
Despite what I’m saying above, I’ve moved on pretty well from the Chicago Board Game Cafe at this point. I like my job, I like the life I’m making moves to build. I also, as it happens, like that I can go back to the cafe and just enjoy it now. Under its new ownership, I’ve hung out there with friends a bunch of times (they really have the best rooms in town for big RPG sessions). I feel welcomed. I don’t feel at home, per se, but I do get an energy from the place.
It feels like a save point.
It’s worth mentioning, by the way — the restaurant that is now Snakes & Lattes Chicago also sits at the Bucktown intersection of Milwaukee, Armitage, and Western Aves, just like all those places my friends and I used to hang out years ago. Ed was really onto something.
To loop back around to the title of the piece — I have only, physically, set foot in Casa Bonita one time, during what I understand were its waning years (I tried to go since then, and the reservation lottery was not kind to my friends and I). And yet, I’ve formed so many emotional connections with this bizarre Mexican restaurant in Colorado — through one of my favorite television shows, a killer road trip, a great video game, a moving film, and the most important project of my career. Time and again, circumstances have brought me back to this place, and I’ve been given unlikely opportunities to explore its space and its meaning. And seeing ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! cemented it for me — bizarrely, for me, Casa Bonita is a sacred place. If you’ll excuse the heavy language, to commune with it makes me feel more whole, energized, and understood. For me, Casa Bonita is definitely a save point. And with their reservations now open to the public… I think maybe I need to be restoring some hit points soon.
Wow, this was an awesome piece. Deftly structured, great mix of personal and information. Sorry about your troubles with CAH
Good tale! I really like the term "save point"; it's a great frame! Also, I would add Super Mario Strikers to that era, for being an incredible Mario sport game; though I guess it was 2005.