In case you don't remember here is what I remember about Critter's Pizza.

It was back in the 80's and I was probably 8 or 10 years old.. Critter's Pizza was run by my parents and my uncle Critter. My Aunt Mary Lou also helped run the place. It was in Alexandria Bay on Rt 12 where the Village Video and barbershop are now.

Critter's was a sub shop, pizza shop. ice cream shop, and a place to get beer and soda.

The Pizza was a Utica style rectangular shell pizza that melted in your mouth and had a great sauce. Dante Morgia from Watertown made the pizza shells for the store. The crust was thick. Slightly crusty on the outside and soft and airy on the inside. The pizza tasted very much like the pizza Attilios sells in Clayton sells now. I remember they had multiple hot delivery units that held 10 pizzas at a time and it was not uncommon for some of the bars downtown to order 100 pizzas in a night from the store on busy weekends. They literally couldn't make pizza fast enough. (let's remember the bar scene in the bay back then was crazy) They sold so much pizza on nights like that they often had to make sheets of topped pizzas up in advanced and freeze them for the busy weekends.

The Soft Ice Cream was a Liquid 10% Custard Blend from Mercers. It was not cheap iced down soft ice cream like they sell at some Ice Cream Shops around here. (The Gals comes to mind as a place to get really bad soft ice cream) To this day the Soft Ice Cream at Critter's is some of best soft ice cream I have ever had. The hard ice cream was Hershey's which is of course pretty good too. They used to make homemade ice cream sandwiches using homemade chocolate chip cookies and Twist from the ice cream machine. They would freeze them each night and sell them the next day. Those things were really good too.

Now for the subs. The thing I remember most about the subs where the Hot Ham & Cheese and Meatball subs. They used to toast them up for you in the ovens and they were phenomenal. They were toasting subs ages before places like subway ever existed.

The inside of the place had a stained wood sort of look to it and places to sit just like the tables and seats inside the Alexandria Bay Jreck subs.

Lastly, I remember the beer coolers. They took up the entire left side of the place and there was a huge walk in area behind all of the doors.

The thing I often ask my parents and uncle are why did the place close. I think the answer was that there were too many partners involved and nobody really wanted to spend all their time their making sure the place got run right. Either that or they didn't have the time. I really don't know. I do know everyone had a lot going on at the time. My parents actually had about 4 places in town they were running so they were quite busy.

Whatever the reason, it's too bad cause it was a great place and one of the best memories I have from being a kid in this town. I've often thought of running a place like it myself because this town needs a good pizza shop.