Casa Bonita closed early Friday due to ‘foul smell’

DENVER (KDVR) — If you had reservations for 7:30 p.m. or 8 p.m. at Casa Bonita on Friday night, you might recall being asked to leave about 15 minutes before the restaurant was slated to close. You might even recall a sewage odor. This is something many customers recalled that night, and now they are looking for answers.

One customer posted her experience on Reddit, to which a couple of others echoed her sentiments. In a phone call with FOX31, Alicia said she arrived at the restaurant with a group of 16 people for a 7:30 p.m. reservation.

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"We were trying to be as efficient as possible when we were there trying to, you know, get our orders in quickly because we wanted to maximize our time just exploring Casa Bonita," she said.

She said the dinner experience was normal, except when one of her friends tried to use the restrooms at the restaurant, but couldn't.

"My friend, like, really had to use the restroom and she wasn't able to," Alicia said. "So, there was definitely some frantic driving to find a bathroom, you know, outside of Casa Bonita."

Then, they wrapped up dinner and decided to explore. That was when she first noticed the smell.

"Around 9:30 p.m., it was clear that there were parts of the restaurant where there was a really strong, like, foul smell," she said.

As it got later, the smell grew worse.

"We wanted to see the cliff divers. We hadn't seen them yet. And when we went to the base of the waterfall, it was overwhelming," Alicia recalled. "Terrible fumes were, were just everywhere in that area."

At around 10:15 p.m., the restaurant closed and everyone inside was asked to leave.

"By that time, the smell was so nauseating. For sure one person threw up on the walk out. I was physically sick and heaving from just how overwhelming and toxic the septic smells were," Alicia said.

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Another guest, Jake Gould agreed.

"It smelled horrible as we were walking out," said Gould.

A representative for the restaurant said there was an issue with the city of Lakewood's system, and the restaurant did close 15 minutes early. However, the restaurant reopened on Saturday with no issues.

The city of Lakewood said in a statement to FOX31:

"The city doesn't provide water or sanitary sewer service to the restaurant. Casa Bonita's sanitary sewer provider is East Jefferson County Sanitation District," said city spokesperson, Stacie Oulton. She added, "Our street maintenance also checked the mains in the street in the area and found all of our city main lines are flowing perfectly with absolutely zero issues. That would indicate it's with the restaurant's service line or internal issue."

FOX31 also reached out to other businesses in the area and the ones that got back to us said everything was normal on Friday night.