That's quite a remarkable claim...
...and quite likely backed up, wow!
It's very common that when one is a guest somewhere, his hosts make it a point to try to impress him.
At least that's always been my experience.
My attitude has always been, no, don't bother, but one has no control over other people.
Knowing of my own preference for pizza when eating out, my own hosts have always insisted upon taking me to what they allege is the "best."
And so I've had the best of pizza in many places, and while both flattered and grateful, after trying out the "best" at this location or that location, an objective evaluation is that the best at some other place never comes up to Valentino's pizza.
I have no idea what makes Valentino's so good, but there it is.
As for the long lines, anyone who was ever in Lincoln as late as the early 1980s--just before the company expanded--has seen the phenomenon, long lines of people on Sunday afternoons, stretching clear around the block, standing and waiting for hours to get into one of the then-three Valentino's.
Especially the Valentino's across the street from the east campus of the University of Nebraska, the very first one. Valentino's did not take reservations; it was first come, first serve, and it's not as if the places could seat hundreds of people at one time.
For some reason--perhaps because they were in old buildings that could not be adjusted very much--"waiting areas" in Valentino's were notoriously small and cramped (and at the time, Valentino's did not serve alcohol, so there was no bar)--and so much of the crowd had to wait outdoors.
The company was owned by an authentically Italian family, with definite ideas how things should be done. To address the demand, they for some reason preferred to stress their "take out" service over their restaurant service. (But given their locations, expanding the restaurants was not an option.)
But that had its own crowd, elbow-to-elbow chin-to-chin people jammed together where one picked up his order to take home. At peak times, that line too stretched way outdoors. To pick up a pizza would much of the time entail waiting 30-45 minutes; and that was no big deal, because when one ordered a pizza, the "ready" time was usually 3-4 hours ahead, no instant service.
Valentino's is a famous Lincoln institution, even making it into the history books as one of the most popular cultural phenomenons of the area at the time.
Of course, as late as the early 1980s, people were different than they are now; people were willing to wait, and the better a product was, the more they were willing to wait. This was not the east, where people push and shove and want something "right now."
