Franco's Metro Restaurant, Bar & Pizza of Fort Lee, NJ — Restaurant in Fort Lee

My father Bill and his wife Anna, and Italian immigrant, both love this charming Fort Lee staple. And from the looks of the crowd the few times I've been there, so does the entire Bergen County area.

My dad is in a wheelchair, due to a stroke back in 2003. So navigating him in public places can be a challenge. Franco's Metro presented a major accessibility challenge to my father when we arrived. The table we were sent to was in the very back of the restaurant, and it was a packed house.

Franco's does a terrific job using their space to accommodate customers, which is a friendly way of saying that they're dining area is filled with tables.

Circumnavigating the labyrinth of seated dining guests was going to be impossible from a wheelchair. My father had to stand up, and walk extraordinarily carefully to our table. I collapsed the wheelchair behind him as he was guided by Anna and my brother Greg to our table. Once there, we opened the wheelchair and my father sat down.

Other diners and the staff at Franco's were incredibly accommodating.

There's nothing we can do sometimes about tight spaces. But what makes it less stressful on my father and by extension me, is the help of passersby and bystanders. At Franco's, the staff and their guests were so incredibly accommodating, that we never had to panic about my father falling to the floor. We never had to worry about being an inconvenience to other guests, and we had a lovely evening with delicious Italian food.

Of the food I will say this: usually when a restaurant is as busy as Franco's was, the quality starts to drop. You generally wait for something as simple as a class of water, and the food sometimes can die under the lights. That was not the case in this packed boutique restaurant. The food was hot, glistening and fresh. The wait staff was clearly taxed and stretched to their limits, yet took time to photograph my father, his wife and my brother and I, because we so seldom get a chance to dine like this together.

I would definitely recommend Franco's Metro every bit for the restaurant's personality and congenial staff, as I would for their delicious authentic...

Good food, especially the pizza. I think the rest of the Italian food is good but certainly not great in my book. Slightly better than Olive Garden in my humble opinion. The restaurant side appears a bit fancier and upscale, and even the service is pretty good, but in the end, it still feels more like a glorified pizzeria. (No offense).

Still, for a small, neighborhood food establishment, it does a good job of offering a good balance of plenty of menu choices, and some of the fare is pretty good while others are just okay. Pizza is good here, but it seems to come from next door anyway, where the pizzeria side of the restaurant operates. Typical food choices like chicken parm and spaghetti with meatballs are good but again, not great! Some items, like the linguine with clams is not very good at all. Not a fan of any of the seafood dishes here, but generally, most of the pasta dishes are decent. For sides, the Italian fries and the large-sized buffalo wings are pretty good though.

Service is very good overall, even when they are busy. The servers are friendly, helpful, and attentive for the most part. The ambience, like I said before, is just okay for me. I feel like the decor tries too hard to cover up the fact that this is a pizzeria. From the colorful laminated menu to the cheesy strip mall that it's located in, we cannot call this place upscale really. But all in all, for a small, local restaurant, this could be considered a neighborhood gem by others. For me, it's just a slightly better option than some of the typical...

Will never be ordering or recommending this place ever again! My wife and I had placed an order on Monday and had it confirmed Tuesday morning for our toddler’s birthday party at school. We ended up getting a call from the school asking when the pizza is supposed to be delivered because it hadn’t been yet, when my wife called to find out she was being told that it was never confirmed and they never had the order although my wife received both the order placed email and order confirmed email which I attached below. No empathy was shown and the management and staff were unhelpful and the only thing offered as a resolution was to expedite the delivery of the pies. When I called for a time frame the female on the phone said she doesn’t know and passed me off to a manager, while passing me to the manager she mentioned that it was the husband. The pies didn’t arrive to the school till 12:40pm when lunch had already passed and then threw off the whole schedule for the entire class of toddlers and teachers and was an hour and 10 minutes after the order delivery time that my wife had scheduled. They have officially lost...