Watch cliff divers plunge into an indoor pool at Casa Bonita
Dinner and a 30-foot dive
A 52,000 square foot pink stucco palace on a Lakewood strip mall, built in 1974 and containing an indoor cliff, a thirty-foot waterfall, a lagoon, a cave, a puppet theatre and a haunted mine shaft. You eat sopapillas while divers in costume throw themselves off the rocks every few minutes. It is not a restaurant with a show attached; the building was designed around the show.
Why it's unique
Casa Bonita is the last survivor of a small chain of themed restaurants built in the 1970s, and everything else in that chain is gone. Nothing was built to replace them, because nobody would now attempt a building of this scale for this purpose.
The cliff diving is the part that cannot be had elsewhere. Divers work a rolling schedule rather than set showtimes, so the falls are in more or less constant use through a dinner service, and the pool sits in the middle of the dining room rather than behind glass. When the restaurant closed for renovation the fate of the divers was a genuine local news story, which tells you something about what this place is to Denver.
Before you go
Reservations open publicly and fill within hours. This is not somewhere you turn up.
Ask for a table with sightlines to the falls when you book — a good portion of the dining room cannot see them, and the whole point is watching. The food was historically the joke, and fixing it was much of what the renovation was for, so arrive with an open mind rather than the reputation. Allow longer than a normal meal: the puppet show, the arcade and the cave are all included and all take time.