Ford's Garage Cape Coral — Restaurant in Cape Coral

Well, sadly I am posting a terrible review of another place that I like. Let me set the scene…

My parents (mid 70s) love this place. We have dinner there about once a week or so and they like the bar. My father is hard of hearing and the corner spot allows us to talk and him stay involved.

The Ps have met and love many of the staff and a few managers. But it’s a high turnover place so we often meet new faces. As was the case this night….

Meaghan, the bartender, was cold to start. We order our drinks and usually my mom asks for water or ice to water hers down. But tonight, her drink was almost clear. She mentioned it and the bartender started talking about standard shots and whatever. No problem - mom orders an extra shot and we move on.

Dad orders our appetizer and meals. Place is basically empty. Ask that courses be staggered. Server brings out wrong appetizer. We correct him and they say it will be fixed. And have this one on us. Ok.

Correct one arrives. Moments later, the salad arrives. Followed immediately by the main course (only time the meatloaf has been blah since I’ve been going). And the bartender - comes around like leap year. Mom is pissed.

Dad is ready to go. His is non conflict and mom wants to low tip (they are over tippers). When bartender finally drops the bill - double charged my entree and had both the correct and mistake appetizers. Takes dad another 10+ minutes to get her to come back. Shows her the mistakes and she says only a manager can fix it - she will get him…

Mom can’t wait - hopes it’s one of her guys. And we wait. 10+ minutes later dad gets bartender attention again. She says they are very busy (place is near empty). My non conflict father asks the manager name and location and to our surprise, follows the bartender to the kitchen.

From the back the manager (Nick) comes with dad - he turns to me for voice of reason. I lay out all the problems that dad already told him. He simply starts rationalizing. Mom jumps in with her complaints. More rationalizing. My dad sternly says to just fix the damn bill - he tells dad to calm down. Mistake.

All three of us now start on him - two are over 70. Two are retired lawyers. He tells us to leave - we go. I doubt my parents will return. Or my mom will come speak to the GM on her own.

Nick has zero management skills. He paid for dinner by throwing us out - my father protesting as he still planned to pay. He probably will call and try tomorrow. Instead of owning it, Nick rationalized. As things deteriorated, instead of picking up the bill with apologies, he ate the bill and ran off regular customers. Nick has probably reached his pinnacle. Meaghan is probably in another of many jobs in life and far from her last.

This might get updated. My parents might reach out - dad to pay, mom to complain - and maybe the story is not over. But for now - buyer beware - this place is going downhill fast in quality of food...

Our party of 4 were there on 4/6/25. We arrived at 7:30 and sat at the bar by the parking lot. We waited for about 15 minutes for the bartender. She looked busy however the bar was not full. We ordered our drinks, 2 beers, Vodka 7 and a no octane Michelada. We received 3 of the drinks. The Michelada was missing all the garnish. I asked her about it and she says " oh you want that? ". I said yes. Waited easily another 10 or more minutes. Still waiting for the other beer. She comes by and plops the garnish in my drink and we asked about the missing beer. She the brings that over. My Michelada was super thick and I asked her if she put the Heineken 00 in it and she says "we are out of that". What?? That is half the drink!! 😳 We finally had to call her back over to take our food order. We waited over 30 minutes while everyone around us had ordered, got their food(some ordered after us). We asked the bartender about our order and said she just checked with the manager and should be on its way. Waited another 20 minutes or more. By this time we had ready been there for an hour and a half and beyond frustrated! We told the bartender this is ridiculous and would like to speak to the manager. After waiting for a while we left the bar and went up to the Hostess station and asked again to speak to a manager. Our food still had not come! We spoke to very nice guy(wish I had his name, dark hair and beard). He was very apologetic. He said she was on the food line and could not speak to us. We could see all the food going by us and still not our order. Finally the manager Allie came out with an attitude. We told her what was happening and I think she thought we had our food and was complaining about how long it took and didn't want to pay for it. We said we NEVER got our food! We said everyone around us had and we hadn't. She says "well, that's your perception!" Really!! I told her that was the reality! Never an apology. She is in dire need of manager training and how to treat customers. We will...

I went here for dinner with my mom on 9/17/25 around 8pm. (For context, I’ve been a server for 5 years and my dad has been a restaurant manager for 20, so it takes a lot for me to write a bad review.)

I arrived before my mom and sat for 6–8 minutes before a server came by. I ordered drinks and a pretzel appetizer. A food runner dropped one of the pretzels on the floor, no big deal, but the replacement was basically frozen in the middle and clearly undercooked. Later, our food came out, and the crispy chicken sandwich I ordered with cheese was brought as a grilled chicken sandwich with no cheese. The runner took it back along with the bad pretzel.

The second pretzel was fine, and my new chicken sandwich was good—but the fries on the plate looked like they’d been sitting under the heat lamp for an hour. As a server myself, I would never bring fries like that to a table, especially on a remake. At that point I didn’t complain because I was already frustrated, and we still hadn’t seen our server since she took the order. She only came back after we asked a food runner to grab her, and by then we were basically done eating.

She took our to-go orders and brought the bill, but she’d rung my chicken sandwich as a burger (three dollars more). I let it go and paid. Once home, I opened the pulled pork mac & cheese I ordered for my boyfriend, and it was the most pathetic to-go order I’ve ever seen—a small fatty piece of pork in the middle of dry noodles with no sauce. He couldn’t eat it. My mom’s boyfriend’s to-go burger came with fries that were hard as a rock, even though my mom specifically asked for fresh ones. We live only five minutes away, so it wasn’t from the drive.

I didn’t plan on writing a review until I got home and saw how bad the mac & cheese looked. I’ve been to the Fort Myers location with no issues, but Cape Coral’s location was extremely...