2516 Durant Ave.
Berkeley, CA
510-845-5353
Despite the name, I didn’t have the pizza. It’s only so often that I can get in the mood for a food so greasy as that, and since we just had some last Friday, I couldn’t bring myself to order it. Val’s seems to be a local tradition of sorts, with multiple locations. The one I visited, again, was on Euclid since it’s close to Soda hall where I’ve been spending so much of my time.
I ended up ordering the pasta combo special, which offered me any pasta on the menu with garlic bread and drink for $5 (plus tax). So for my $5.43 I got shrimp linguine. It was alright. Served kind of tepid, drowning in oil. The shrimp were thrown in along with some tomatoes and an absolute boatload of olives (why?), all seemingly as an afterthought. There was no cohesion to the dish. It was linguine which happened to have other stuff in it. The garlic bread was good though meager, and clearly prepared well ahead of time. I’d say the highlight of the meal was the lemonade-sprite cocktail I mixed as my drink–I haven’t had anything but water recently in order to keep costs down.
In short, this was a fast-food Italian place and pretty unimpressive. I’ll probably go again to try the pizza, but otherwise no thanks.
As a footnote, I really have been doing things other than just eating lunch while at Berkeley. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll work up the gumption to give a full report.
dude, it’s la vals. i just had to correct it 🙂
thanks for pointing that out. but who are you?