Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Casa Bonita
Casa Bonita opened in 1974 in Lakewood, Colorado, built around an enormous, deliberately over-the-top dining experience combining Mexican-American food with entertainment including cliff divers performing above an indoor pool, strolling mariachi bands, and a puppet theater, all under one roof. The restaurant became nationally famous well beyond Colorado after being featured in a 2003 episode of "South Park," whose co-creator Trey Parker had grown up visiting the actual restaurant, an episode that turned Casa Bonita into a broader pop-culture reference point for an entire generation who'd never actually visited. Casa Bonita closed during the COVID-19 pandemic before Parker and fellow "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone purchased the restaurant in 2021 specifically to save and restore it, reopening it in 2023 with renovated dining rooms and performances while preserving the core cliff-diving and entertainment format that made it famous. Casa Bonita's combination of its genuinely theatrical dinner-and-entertainment format and its unlikely rescue and restoration by the creators of the show that made it famous has made it one of the most culturally unusual and specifically beloved Mexican-American restaurants anywhere in the country.
VS
El Cholo
El Cholo traces back to 1922, when Alejandro and Rosa Borquez opened a small eatery on Western Avenue originally called the Sonora Cafe. As the story goes, a customer sketched a figure on the menu in 1925 and the nickname stuck, and the restaurant was rechristened El Cholo — a name a family restaurant built for a broad Los Angeles audience, rather than a specific immigrant neighborhood, has carried for a century since. It's now run by the sixth generation of the Borquez family, one of the oldest continuously operating Mexican restaurants in the city, with the Western Avenue location still its flagship. The green corn tamales are the restaurant's most specifically beloved dish — a seasonal item, made only when fresh corn is available, wrapped and steamed the traditional way, that regulars plan visits around rather than treating as just another menu item. The restaurant's margarita program has built its own separate reputation, cited for decades as among the best traditional margaritas in the city. Rather than the corn-tortilla street format that defines most modern taquerias, El Cholo's tacos and broader menu sit closer to a classic American-Mexican and Tex-Mex tradition — flour tortillas, combination plates, and a full sit-down dining room service, the kind of format that shaped how generations of Americans without a personal connection to Mexican regional cooking first encountered the cuisine. El Cholo has grown into a small group of Los Angeles-area locations over its long history, but it's never abandoned the Western Avenue original or the format that built its reputation in the first place — a rare thing for a restaurant nearing its hundredth year in business.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Casa Bonita
About El Cholo
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
