New Denver Venue Licensing Draft Gets Pushback From Club Owner

Regas Christou is frustrated.

Christou has owned and operated more successful Denver nightclubs and entertainment spaces than anyone for the past four decades: His creations include The Church and Club Vinyl, which he recently sold, plus Bar Standard, 1134 Broadway, Milk and a yet-to-debut venture called Parea. But when the city’s Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (formerly the Department of Excise and Licenses) decided to revise the way licenses are granted to commercial entities ranging from music venues to pool halls, no one at the agency sought his input or even gave him a heads-up. He found out about the process around the same time Westword published an overview of the draft proposal on April 17, prior to the first of two virtual listening sessions. By then, the plan, which is scheduled to go before Denver City Council in June, had been in the works for around a year.

“Nobody knew about this,” he says. “This didn’t come to my attention until my lawyer called me last week. I had to call other [business] people to tell them about it. A lot of my friends have been blindsided. Why didn’t they have a big-ass meeting and invite all the licensees?”

He adds: “One person who had heard about it said they’d told the city, ‘The person you should call is Regas,’ and they said they would. But they didn’t do it.”

While Christou lacks hard evidence that this oversight was purposeful, he has his suspicions. According to him, representatives of the Denver Police Department “tried to put me out of business for thirteen years because I was a witness to a shooting” — the March 1996 officer-involved killing of Jeff Truax outside 1082 Broadway, another of his properties — “and I told the truth instead of telling their story.” Since then, his relationship with city officialdom in general has been fraught, and the details of the initial relicensing draft have done nothing to reassure him that a better vibe is in the offing.

In a conference room at CoClubs’ headquarters, the nexus of his empire, Christou waves a document he’s heavily highlighted. One passage that especially concerns him is on the first page: “Upon receipt of an application for a new cabaret license the director may schedule a public hearing upon the application not less than forty (40) days from the date of receipt of the application.” As he points out, the word “may” had previously read “shall,” and he sees the ambiguity as telling.

“I think putting so much trust and so much power into the hands of the director is absurd,” he says.

The director in question is Molly Duplechian, and she says that such hearings should become even less common under the new regulations. “Right now, all cabaret licenses require a public hearing,” she says. “But in our proposal, to line up what we’ve done with marijuana and liquor licenses, those hearings will only occur if a neighborhood submits enough requests for it to happen. And so far, we’ve issued 91 [marijuana and liquor] licenses and have only had one actual hearing.”

This assertion doesn’t reassure Christou, who fears that hearings will be wielded as a form of punishment against folks like him. “Once you give someone that kind of power,” he says, “they’re never going to give it back.”

Duplechian tells Westword that changes can still be made in the draft before its consideration by Denver City Council and portrays the timeline as slow and deliberate. Christou doesn’t buy this assertion, arguing that a couple of Zoom calls, which took place when he was out of town, are woefully insufficient to truly gauge how business owners and the general public feel about the doc. Neither is he reassured by Duplechian saying that vague portions of the text will be clarified during the rulemaking stage that would follow council approval. “By then, it’s too late,” he says.

To justify his lack of faith, Christou points to the revised Denver noise ordinance that the city council approved in February 2025. “Nobody knew about that, either,” he maintains, and he’s nettled by numerous aspects of the final version. For instance, “you can have as many events as you want at City Park at 85 decibels, but if I want to do something, it’s 55 decibels. Why? Because city facilities are all exempt from this ordinance. They want to make things easier for everything the city controls and the rest of us are screwed.”

Granted, Christou thinks licensing needs to be “reinvented.” He points to his experiences with Parea, located at 40 East 11th Avenue, just down the street from CoClubs’ location.

During an interview for an April 2025 Westword profile, Christou predicted that what he described as a “listening lounge” would be open to the public about a month from then, and the Denver Business Journal reported last October that Parea’s bow was imminent. But the venue still hasn’t opened and remains entangled in red tape, with no clear date by which all of it will finally break free.

Back in 2019, when Christou started working on the 11th Avenue structure, his concept was dubbed “The Truck Stop on Lincoln” and involved a “proposed outdoor two-story food truck square with rooftop deck.” After the 2020 COVID shutdown, he shifted to the current Parea model — but making it a reality hasn’t been easy.

“It took me three years to get the permit to build Parea,” he divulges. “I changed the kitchen, I expanded the footprint to include the whole building and put a patio outside.”

His self-confessed mistake? He didn’t get the city’s approval for the patio before building it. “I’m impatient,” he says. “However, I have picture of everything I’ve done, and it was all done to code. Safety has been my number-one priority for forty years, and I’ve never been sued because something fell down or broke. So I didn’t think it would be a big deal — but in May or June of last year, the city made me reapply for permits from the beginning. They ordered me to do ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act] ramps, which I did, and we had to redo the entire electrical system. And then everything seemed to be okay.”

It wasn’t. “The city had a problem with the plastic I put on top of the patio,” Christou says. “I had a lady paint these beautiful flowers on the wall and the ceiling, and they told me I had to take the ceiling off because toxic fumes were going to get trapped underneath the plastic and people were going to get sick and die, which is a laughable reason, because three sides of the patio are open.”

The flowers are still in virtual bloom at Parea, and during a tour of the facility, he makes it clear they’re not going anywhere. The rest of the joint is striking, as well. Light fixtures on trendy industrial scaffolds are in place, a striking mural overlooks seating areas stacked with chairs and tables, and decorative plants are arrayed in a neat row. With the exception of a few spots where small piles of soil have yet to be floored over, it seems customer-ready. Yet permission to hang the “open” sign remains elusive.

“This is one of the coolest projects I’ve ever done — a little more creative than a nightclub,” he says, “and the neighborhood can’t wait for it to open. The neighborhood has always been on my side. But we’re still waiting. After two of my inspectors signed off, I reached out to the mayor and his people, but they basically told me nothing.”

The ongoing delay makes Christou feel distinctly underappreciated. “I’ve only been doing this shit for forty years. I’ve employed thousands of people, paid thousands of dollars to the city. But they still make me take three years to open Parea because I didn’t pull a damn permit to finish the patio. If it’s not a safety issue, why can’t they just say, ‘We’re going to fine you $1,000 for not pulling the permit, but let’s open it and make some money for the city….’ But they won’t do it.”

Right now, Christou says he’s organizing with other entrepreneurs to press for the new licensing regs to be less restrictive. “Some of these rules I understand,” he says. “But some of them have no place in the business world, because they’re so time-consuming. Financially, it makes no sense, and I think control needs to loosen up so they’ll let the rest of us make Denver everything it could be.”

Read the first-draft release of the new licensing bill here.