Alger’s Pizza Palace is celebrating 35 years in business this November.
And while Faye Alger may have stepped down from running the business more than 20 years ago, it is still a business that’s steeped in the family tradition.
“We’ve never changed our product in the last 35 years,” Rawley Alger, current owner said. “If you ate a pizza here at Pizza Palace in the past 35 years, we’re still using the same ingredients and cooking procedures we’ve utilized since then. The same measurements for all of our ingredients, the same weights.”
That adherence to the formula and sticking with a stone oven to cook the pizzas is why Rawley feels the business has been so successful over the years.
Part of that cooking procedure when using a stone oven requires the pizza chefs to learn to judge by eyesight when a pizza is cooking and find the right hot spot in the oven to cook the pizzas evenly.
Faye, Lisa and Rawley know Pizza Palace has their regular customers, people who visit with frequency, but they also know the restaurant has been a destination for parties as well. From birthday parties to wedding receptions or wedding rehearsal dinners.
Pizzas offeredAlger’s Pizza Palace is known for their deep-dish pizzas. It’s what the restaurant built their business around.
“When you’re cooking a deep-dish pizza, you’re looking for an outside, sides and bottom of the pizza to have that golden crust,” Rawley said.
The restaurant also offers thin crust pizzas as well which have been growing in popularity over the last several years.
The restaurant tries to keep to the vision of the pizzeria that Larry Alger had when he started the pizzeria alongside Faye.
After Larry passed, Faye was the sole operator of the pizzeria for four years. As she got older, she determined it would be best for one of her six children to lead the family business. Rawley was the one who stepped in to do so and keep this mom-and-pop pizza restaurant functioning in uptown Mount Vernon.
Aside from Rawley and Lisa, there have been a number of other Alger family members who have worked at the establishment. Rawley and Lisa’s daughter and her husband routinely still have shifts at the pizza restaurant to this day. A number of the grandkids of Faye Alger have also worked for the family business over the years.
The restaurant is open seven days a week, but Rawley and Lisa both noted the business is usually its busiest Thursdays on into the weekends.
The family notes the location in uptown has definitely helped the restaurant to be successful.
“You just couldn’t beat this location for a pizza restaurant,” Faye said.
Rawley recounts over the 35 years Pizza Palace has been in business, that there have been other pizza providers in Mount Vernon. There was a Pizza Hut down on Hwy. 30 for a number of years, and Mabe’s Pizzeria. Today, there’s Pizza Palace and Lincoln Wine Bar in uptown Mount Vernon.
One of the big boons for the business, the Alger family all noted, has been having Cornell College just down the road.
Lisa has also capitalized on knowing who Cornell will be playing against and offering pizzas to be delivered after the contests for visiting competitors, with paper plates, napkins and plastic silverware.
“It’s one of those things that is very convenient for that opposing team to have a well-cooked meal before they hit the road again and not have to worry about stopping at a restaurant on the way home,” Lisa said. “Email has made that part of the job so much easier, as in the past I had to call the opposing team by phone and hope they got the message and gave us a phone call. We’ve gotten fantastic return business from that offering.”
The other boon has been the numerous birthday parties and celebrations that have been hosted at Pizza Palace over the years, that the restaurant is a family destination for important events.
What Rawley enjoys most about this family restaurant lasting for 35 years in uptown Mount Vernon is how happy the products the Pizza Palace cook makes people.
“In the last two weeks I’ve had two separate people tell me this is one of the best pizzas they’ve ever had,” Rawley said. “One was a doctor in Iowa City who has been to places like Chicago, New York and Italy, and he put it up there with pizzas he’s had in those locations. Another is someone who travels around the world and made the stop here because of word of mouth and told me the pizza lived up to the hype. If you’re a pizza connoisseur, Pizza Palace should be a stop on your bucket list.”
Challenges for
the restaurantThe building used to be the grocery store in uptown Mount Vernon years ago, and was an electronics store when Larry and Faye bought the establishment and converted it into a restaurant.
The one biggest issue the Algers note that is needed for all uptown businesses – more parking.
“For some of our older customers, climbing the hill to Main Street can be a tougher challenge,” Rawley said.
The other issue the Algers reiterate to all customers – making quality pizza takes time.
“I know there are people who call in on Friday evening when they’re hungry, and then hear it’s going to be a 40 minutes to hour and 20-minute wait for a pizza to be delivered,” Rawley said. “I’ve been that hungry, and when you’re hearing an hour and 20-minute wait, that can be upsetting. We cook these things by eye so they’re a quality pizza and that takes additional time, especially for a deep-dish pie.”
Alger’s Pizza Palace tries to keep their pricing consistent as well. Rawley noted they’ve only raised their prices once within the past 20 years, even as costs for items like soda, food and insurance are slowly increasing.
“The thing that’s really hurt over the past several years has been many of our suppliers have moved away from allowing you to pay for the products you order over the next two weeks to having to be paid upon receiving delivery of supplies,” Rawley said. “It’s hard to pay for supplies for food upfront if you don’t know what your sales the next weeks are going to be.”
And then there was the derecho of 2020. Pizza Palace, like many of the restaurants in uptown Mount Vernon, lost power for several days. The end result was the restaurant was closed for more than nine days. Insurance paid for lost produce and food items, but it still took days later after the electricity had been restored for the trucks to arrive with items.
While Pizza Palace’s delivery and carryout offerings have helped them last throughout COVID-19, the restaurant has definitely seen a downturn in customers for the past year as well.
“We can’t blame anyone for that, because they were doing what they could to keep themselves safe,” Rawley said. “We’re sure glad that the vaccine has come out and started to have more people willing to dine out again.”
The impact is still felt with the absence of the Sunday church crowds in uptown Mount Vernon.
“We know people are just being safe and that as the virus wanes, that we’re going to see these crowds return again,” Rawley said.
Supporting local businessesRawley does praise the work of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community Development Group, however, in the number of large festivals held in Uptown Mount Vernon over the years. Those festivals bring in large swaths of customers.
The Algers are huge supporters of the other businesses in uptown Mount Vernon, noting that the uptown thrives when all of these individual businesses work together.
“We know The Local and Yock’s Landing have both been establishments we helped in the past month, as they were having events that needed pizzas delivered to people at their locations,” Lisa said. “The theme if you’re in uptown is we’re all here together, and we all benefit from people recommending business to each of our directions. It’s nice to have this mix of old and new businesses in the uptown as well as the Cornell students to help us all bloom.”
Lisa and Rawley also both have additional jobs in the community. Lisa has been a teacher at Mount Vernon Schools for the past 20 years. Rawley works for the United States Postal Service during the weekdays, a role he has held for the past 17 years.
Fire didn’t stop
the business More than 25 years ago, Pizza Palace was one of four businesses impacted by a large fire in the uptown business district.
Rawley remembers seeing the glowing fire in uptown Mount Vernon from miles away.
One of the things that remained standing after the fire was the mural, painted by family friend Mickey Woods on the interior wall of the Pizza Palace building.
For Rawley and the family, the community support after that fire was what made them focus on rebuilding and reopening their restaurant.
One of the improvements they made when rebuilding the top floor was to create space for multiple two-bedroom apartments. The revenue from those apartments helps the restaurant in some tougher time periods.
And 25 years later, the restaurant is still going strong today from that setback.
Alger’s Pizza Palace in uptown Mount Vernon when the building first opened.