Jovanina’s Broken Italian is waving the white flag. More accurately, the LoDo restaurant isn’t waving a flag at all, after Denver officials required owner Jake Linzinmeir to take down a banner jutting out from the 1520 Blake property. “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,” he says.
Finding a sign that Linzinmeir and the city could agree on has been a years-long challenge. When he originally started developing Jovanina’s back in 2018, Linzinmeir had a historic, restored cafe sign that he wanted to put on the building, but the city nixed that idea.
Instead, Linzinmeir installed a window decal sign with the Jovanina’s name. But he needed something people could see from 15th and 16th streets, especially during the pandemic. But now the pandemic is over…and the flag is down. Says Anneliese:…