Trey Parker and Matt Stone stumble into kitchen nightmare in ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! trailer

The documentary will screen at Telluride before rolling out to select cities in September

By Emma Keates  |  August 29, 2024 | 5:03pm
Screenshot: MTV Documentary Films/YouTube
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Trey Parker and Matt Stone stumble into kitchen nightmare in ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! trailer
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Trey Parker and Matt Stone long ago conquered the worlds of television (through South Park, of course) and Broadway (Book Of Mormon), but in 2021, they made a major jump into the realm of their childhood foodie dreams. Or rather, what would turn out to be their Kitchen Nightmares, as the new trailer for ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! suggests.

In 2021, Parker and Stone spent a huge pile of their own money to buy decrepit but legendary Colorado establishment, Casa Bonita. Touting itself on its website as “the greatest restaurant in the world,” Casa Bonita is a sprawling Mexican eatery featuring cliff divers, caves to explore, puppet shows, and much, much more. It was also featured several times in both South Park and the 2017 video game, South Park: The Fractured but Whole.

“The kid in me was just like, ‘Hey, you wanna buy Disneyland?’ I could do that?” Parker says of his decision to purchase the restaurant in the trailer, one that led to the two-year restoration journey documented in ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!. “It’s just sitting there. It sucks,” he told The Hollywood Reporter back in 2021. “For a moment when it was like, ‘Casa Bonita is going to close down,’ we said, ‘We’re going to go buy it.’ And I felt like it was the crowning achievement of my life.”

But the process wasn’t all margaritas and roses. As the trailer illuminates, the restaurant’s infrastructure was in shambles and the partners ended up sinking far more money than they had planned into the renovation. So was it all worth it? We’ll see in the film.

¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! won the Audience Award when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. It will screen again at Telluride this weekend, before rolling out to select theaters in Denver on September 6 and other select U.S. cities September 13.

 
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