Business at Casa Bonita is currently booming. If you want to book a table for Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s novelty Mexican restaurant, the earliest reservation available as of right now is in mid-January. But don’t let the packed crowds fool you, it’s seemingly still a long way from turning a profit.
As we’ve previously mentioned, it could take Parker and Stone more than half a century of serving meals to make their $40 million investment back. But that estimate only accounts for the food being sold, not any merchandising tie-ins. And if there’s anyone who knows about hawking useless licensed merchandise, it’s the creators of South Park.
The Casa Bonita empire has already been making money from non-food side hustles, including the documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, which played in select theaters before landing on Paramount+. And there’s also El Mercado at Casa Bonita, the restaurant’s “official store.” That’s right, you don’t need to actually go to Casa Bonita in order to buy Casa Bonita-branded souvenirs, you can just order them online and lie to all your friends.
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The store’s website is overflowing with crap products ranging from T-shirts, to baseball caps, to mugs, to socks, to scrunchies, to keychains, to margarita mix. More unusually, Casa Bonita is also selling custom skis for $1,767. It is in Colorado, after all.
Since Christmas is coming up, the store has a line of holiday-themed merch as well, which includes ornaments, cookie cutters and candles that smell like Casa Bonita. Some of their scented candles sound pretty pleasant, like Mexican Hot Chocolate, but there’s also one called “Casa Christmas” that smells like fir trees mixed with their iconic dive pool.
Wait, what?
The website brags that the candle is “more than just a candle, it’s a conversation piece.” That’s because “when guests arrive at your house for a holiday party this year they’ll say ‘What’s that smell?’ you can proudly tell them that it is the smell of Casa Bonita at Christmas time.”
The pool seems like an odd choice of subject to theme an odor-based product around, considering that it used to be an overwhelming olfactory presence at the restaurant. While Matt Stone promised that the new Casa Bonita “doesn’t stink like chlorine anymore,” the dive pool itself reportedly still smells like chlorine. Which makes total sense, since it’s not a real body of water, it’s a heated pool inside of an eatery.
So does that mean that the candle smells like Christmas trees mixed with chlorine? That may sound slightly off-putting, but one Colorado outlet has argued that Casa Bonita’s pool smell is “iconic,” not unlike Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. That could explain why each candle costs a staggering $43. For that much money, we expect them to at least lie and say it smells like Gwyneth Paltrow’s junk.
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Maybe with all that candle money in the bank, they’ll be able to offer performers who work in the smelly dive pool the “fair pay” and “benefits” they’ve been asking for.