Well, that was fast! Just last week, we wrote about Sliver Pizzeria closing shop on Center Street, and today, we learned — thanks to Berkeleyside reader Allison Landa — that it has already found a new home on Telegraph Avenue. Sliver soft-opened today at 2468 Telegraph Ave. in the space last occupied by another pizza joint, Pieology, which closed in July 2017.
We stopped in this afternoon and found a mostly empty restaurant, which isn’t too surprising given that Sliver’s owners didn’t make any prior announcements of this new location, and have been keeping mum since it first announced it was moving. Although there were no crowds today, it shouldn’t be too long before the new Sliver on the Southside neighborhood of Berkeley is full of Cal students, who’ve just returned from winter break.
Sliver was first opened in Berkeley in 2013 by Cheese Board alumni, Guillermo Willy Perez, Artemio Maldonado and Dwight Ferron. As with Cheese Board, it offers a pizza of the day, with an extra “sliver” thrown in for good measure (read our recent Ask Nosh column to find out more about how that tradition started). Today, the pizza du jour was topped with corn, Roma tomatoes, caramelized onions mixed with red cabbage, mozzarella, Bulgarian feta and avocado parmesan cheese spread.
Since opening, Sliver has donated a percentage of its profits to organizations working to end human trafficking, a tradition that it continues to this day, which explains its slogan: “pizza with a conscience.”
The new Sliver is very spacious. There’s plenty of booth and shared table seating in the expansive space. Around the corner from the main dining area, there’s a hidden, somewhat dark hang-out area with couches, a piano, acoustic guitar and two televisions airing sports. If it’s trying to invoke a college apartment, we’d say it’s pretty successful.
To celebrate its new location, for the rest of January, Sliver will be offering a discount on slices ($2.50, compared to $3.25) and whole pies ($19, compared to $24). Along with its green sauce, there’s also a new red “fire” sauce, which tasted of habanero peppers. We were warned that it was very spicy; use sparingly if you’re afraid of heat.
We were also told that some new menu items would be coming soon, including a creamy pasta dish, gluten-free pizza, new salads and an 8″ pizza cookie, which will be cut into pizza-shaped slices.
