Jovanina’s Broken Italian is waving the white flag. Or, more accurately, the downtown restaurant isn’t waving a flag at all, after Denver officials required the business to take down a banner jutting out from the 1520 Blake property, which was designed so that people could find the eatery from either 16th or 15th streets.
“They said, ‘If you don’t take it down, we’re going to start citing you and it’s going to end up being thousands of dollars,’ so I took it down and I’m spending over $13,000 on a new sign,” says Jake Linzinmeir, who owns the restaurant.
Finding a sign that Linzinmeir and the city could agree on has been a years-long challenge. When he originally started developing the LoDo restaurant back in 2018, Linzinmeir says, he had a historic, restored cafe sign that he wanted to put on the building, but the city nixed that idea…