Vol. 3, No. 2 February 2007, Hot Eats
Good as it Gets
Metro is all about award winning pizza
In a city with seemingly as many celebrity chef restaurants as there are celebrity chefs, such low-brow cuisine as pizza often gets overlooked. After all, a pizza is a pizza, and there is a Dominos or Pizza Hut in nearly every American burg with a population in excess of 500. But just as McDonald’s is to hamburgers, these national chains are to pizza; throwing processed “cheese” onto frozen dough, adding heavily sugared sauce, some frozen vegetables and processed “meat” does not make a good pizza, regardless of what sales figures suggest.
Those who have been fortunate enough to taste this great comfort food in its hometown of Manhattan often find themselves on a quixotic mission to find the same caliber pizza in other cities. And those who are successful in their search usually find a pizza parlor with some roots in New York. Such is the case with the ever-popular Metro Pizza in Las Vegas.
Founded by John Arena Sr., John Arena Jr. and their cousin Sam Facchini, Metro Pizza is essentially the fruits of a century of family tradition. When their grandparents first came to America, they took up residence on Spring Street, in the heart of Little Italy, a few hundred feet away from Gennaro Lombardi’s pizzeria, arguably the first pizza parlor in the country. The family learned the pizza business in this historic restaurant, and in 1980, Facchini and the junior Arena moved to Las Vegas to start their own pizza business.
From its early days as the Original New York Pizza on East Flamingo Road, the business has expanded and now comprises three restaurants operating under the Metro Pizza name. While the name has changed, the old traditions of using dough made daily, real cheese and fresh meat and vegetables remains. The result is what a good number of educated people deem the best pizza in Las Vegas; from the regular pies to specialty East Side pizzas like the New Haven with chopped calms and garlic and the New Orleans with shrimp, garlic and Roma tomatoes, stuffed pizzas, calzones and more.
In addition to making a pizza just about any way requested, Metro also has a few unexpected offerings that would likely be overlooked by the uninitiated calling in a carryout order—the best of them coming out of the deep fryer. Metro has surprisingly good calamari and fried mozzarella, as well as garlic fries and the spicy, cholesterol- and cheese-laden atomic fries.
If Metro has one shortcoming, it is a lack of available draft beers. While there are plenty of bottled beers from which to choose, the draft selection is limited to Coors Light. Few things go better with a good pizza than a pitcher of good beer, and Coors Light, while tolerable, most certainly isn’t good beer. Making up for the lack of beer choices, Metro runs regular wine specials, selling a selected brand for $10 a bottle. The wines are usually domestic reds, merlot and cabernet sauvignon mostly, quite drinkable and nothing like the crappy Gallo table wine you would expect for the price. To the wine aficionado, these are probably the equivalent of Coors Light, but for those people, there is also a selection of higher-quality—and priced—wines available, too.
There are a lot of great places to eat in Las Vegas, but few of them offer the same combination of value, convenience and quality as Metro. There is a reason locals always name it the best pizza in Las Vegas, and also a reason the book Everybody Loves Pizza: The Deep Dish on America’s Favorite Food named it among the Top 10 pizzerias in the nation
Metro Pizza
1395 East Tropicana Ave.
(702) 736-1955
4178 Koval Lane
(702) 312-5888
4001 South Decatur Blvd.
(702) 362-7869
Greg Jones is managing editor of Casino Connection Nevada, as well as associate editor of Global Gaming Business magazine.
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