Il Valentino Köln-City — Restaurant in Cologne

This is essentially a trattoria but styled more like a local pub with its wood laden interior and bar. The staff is friendly and serve with promptness and professionalism. The portions are big and reasonably priced, but tastewise, the food they serve is nothing outstanding. The seafood is particulary bland in taste and clearly a mix of frozen products. As far as I can tell, they do not rely on ingredients of designated/protected geographical origin in general. As far as pizzas go, they have a neapolitanish look but the crust is not puffy enough. There are a few big black superficial burn marks instead of sporadically distributed small burns (leopard spots) hinting that the baking oven is operated at lower temperatures. Due to very high heat losses and associated costs (of gas or electricity) most ovens at similar restaurants are operated around 300 degrees Celcius or lower. The temperature is not an academic curiosity, though. It fundamentally determines a pizza's taste and texture. Finally, tomato quality is always a good (and quick) indicator of the overall quality in Italian cuisine, because the aroma and the flavor of tomatoes is contributed by a multitude of chemical ingredients (sugars, volatile compounds, amino acids etc.) and almost impossible to fake or improve later artificially, especially during off-season. Here, they aren't much different from what you could readily get from DM or Lidl. My actual rating would be a 3.5, and the current average rating is unrealistically high. There is nothing wrong with this place, it is just not an outstanding place to experience...

My partner and I had a reservation for 18:30 and entered the restaurant at 18:27. We were told that we had to wait 5 minutes for a table, which is completely fine. We were sat by the bar to wait, but the wait ended up being 30(!!) minutes... No one gave us an explanation or said sorry about the wait. When we were finally sat down at our table, we had to wait a really long time untill we could order. I had the Spaghetti Frutti Di Mare, expecting fresh seafood, but everything was (obviously) frozen and very fishy. My partner had a pizza, which was bland and therefore not very tasty. After dinner we ordered a panna cotta, which on the menu looked really nice. When we tasted it, the fruit was really sour (frozen?) and the panna cotta itself had no taste. After that we wanted to pay the bill, and we had to wait 10 minutes before someone brought out bill? Why should it take so long to bring out a receipt and pay? Furthermore, the staff spoke bad English, which is fine but in a big tourist city like Köln you would expect someone to speak English.

The atmosphere was nice though, a bit cramped...

We visited this place because it was one of the rare in Köln that offers gluten free pizza. My parter has serious celiac medical condition, which means he can't eat any gluten. The place is very small, crouded italian restaurant. Very friendy staff and the wine was good. We wanted one gluten free pizza but they didn't have any gluten free dought. So insted of pizza they offered us gluten free foccacia. My partner was hungry so he said yes. The food was ok average, nothing special, we ate much better gluten free pizza/foccacia. But when we had to pay for our surprise the gluten free dought was extra +6,5 eur!!! I mean 6,5 eur! We paid around 33-35 eur for 2 glasses of wine and foccaca!!! I mean thats making fun of people that have serious medical condition and have no other option of what and where they'll eat. We traveled all around the world but nowhere in this planet there was a +6,5 eur to pay extra for gluten free food. On the menu there was no where to be found this 6,5 eur! I mean at least they should tell us before there is this kind of insane amount of money for...