I first went to Casa Bonita when I lived in the dorms at the University of Colorado Boulder. One of my dormmates described a restaurant that was beyond ridiculous:
"So get this: there's a restaurant with cliff diving, a haunted house, an arcade, and kids' shows, all in this giant pink colonial building in a strip mall on Colfax Ave. Oh, and the food? Probably the worst Mexican food you've ever had. Plus the whole place smells like an indoor pool. I love it there."
When I finally went during my sophomore year in college, I found all of it to be true. I thought to myself that if the food was halfway decent and it didn't smell… uhm… weird, this place would be incredible. It was such a strange and fabulous place.
All that said, I never imagined I'd get to work with Casa Bonita, but during the pandemic, the creators of South Park (whose show and video game prominently feature the restaurant) bought Casa Bonita and began to rebuild it. Their motto was "change nothing, improve everything."
When they decided to begin soft opening the restaurant, they asked interested people to sign up for an email list. Casa Bonita would then use that list to test the reservation system and the new restaurant operation. The only issue was that most of Colorado’s Front Range (Denver, Boulder, Colorado City), and quite a few people from beyond, began signing up. The owners quickly realized it would take years to get through everyone on the list.
Following this realization is when we started working with them. Casa Bonita's owners wanted to thank everyone on the list for waiting. We created the Founders Club. Everyone on the list gets priority reservations, a 10% discount, and membership in the least exclusive, most exclusive club. They would also get both a digital and physical founders card and a page to manage their reservations.
While we were building out the Founders Club, the Casa Bonita team decided they wanted to make a few changes, including overhauling their reservation system. That's when we worked to develop their new reservation system, integrate the Founders Club, and build out their marketing website with communication tools and menu.
We needed systems that could handle massive demand, manage a fair queue, keep the restaurant at full capacity month after month, support a special Founders Club membership program, and be manageable by a restaurant team, not an IT department. All this was devoted to helping a beloved cultural institution successfully reopen.
We knew we'd get hammered on day one, so we built for scale from the start. We chose Next.js for modern React with server-side rendering, Supabase for PostgreSQL with real-time capabilities, and Vercel for automatic scaling and edge functions. We chose SevenRooms, which handles load better than its competitors and offers the most configurable option. Finally, given the traffic hitting the site each time batches of reservations would be released, we integrated Queue-it to manage the substantial reservation queue.
As previously intimated, this wasn't a typical restaurant website. We were building a platform that needed to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous users, real-time queue position updates, secure authentication for Founders Club members, admin interfaces for restaurant staff, and integration with reservation systems.
With these tools we were able to sign up hundreds of thousands of people into the Founders Club in a single evening. We were able to give Founders priority access to reservations, handle 40,000 people trying to get a reservation at the same time with a progressive queuing system, and then hand the system off for the restaurant staff to manage with no code required. I love that.
Today, Casa Bonita is a place that brings me (and many others) joy. The new owners really did manage to improve just about everything. The food is a million times better and the curious chlorine smell of old is nowhere to be found. The puppet show is hilarious, and the cliff diving in the middle of the restaurant...well, that is always the star.