Paul’s Family Restaurant is the definition of a homegrown business, if you’re judging it from the handmade tables at which diners sit or the garden vegetables served with its meals.
John Paul might be 93, but he still has the strength and ability to build tables by hand in his woodworking shop and to grow the tomatoes, cabbage, peppers and other items served at the restaurant that bears his name.
He recently made 24 booth tables and is in the process of finishing four round tables as he completes the task of replacing older furniture pieces himself, using skills his father taught him when he was a boy.
“We love the dining room tables we found at auction but weren’t able to come up with anything similar for our booths,” said Paul’s daughter, Elaine Paul, who owns and runs the restaurant. “So my father bought beautiful oak planks directly from a sawmill.
“He never ceases to amaze us,” she said. “He’s always busy and always up for a challenge.”
Paul’s day typically begins about 5 a.m. with a visit to the vegetable garden he tends that’s adjacent to the restaurant — something he’s been doing for decades.
“I didn’t get the idea for the garden here. When I was growing up in Greece, there were no Jewel or other stores. We had to grow our own garden to survive. That gets in you,” he said.
Elaine Paul said her father and mother, Stella, who died in 2015, both came from Greek families of subsistence farmers. Her father, whose name at birth was Ioannis Apostolopoulos, arrived in the United States 67 years ago.
“With quick work, some clerk behind a desk (for immigration and customs at LaGuardia Airport in New York) turned his name into John Paul, and it was on to Chicago,” Elaine Paul said.
Before opening his restaurant, John Paul worked at Elgin’s legendary Blue Moon Restaurant and Ballroom.
He and Stella met in Elgin, married in 1960 and opened the Douglas Coffee Shop in 1961, the precursor to their restaurant at 1300 Lawrence Ave. When they retired in the early 1990s, they sold the business to their daughter and two business partners.
“Over the last several years, my partners retired and the restaurant is once again solely owned by the Paul family,” Elaine Paul said.
Despite stepping away from the business on a full-time basis, John Paul continued to plant two gardens until last year. While he continues with the one next to the restaurant, the other was part of several acres on Randall Road that he sold to Ortho Illinois for its new center.
“I’m glad that land is for a good, medical use, and not another storage facility,” Paul said.
On his plot, he grows a couple varieties of tomatoes, cabbage, zucchini, parsley, peppers, Swiss chard and sunflowers. He tends to it throughout the day, seven days a week, watering, staking, fertilizing and weeding.
Both Pauls said a common misconception is that growing produce is a cost-savings measure for the restaurant.
“Between the city water bill and costs to rent and use tractors and rototillers and the labor to plant and weed and harvest, there really isn’t a savings,” Elaine Paul said.
“But my dad sincerely enjoys the compliments from the customers and that the customers love that we grow our own vegetables,” she said. “I don’t think he could put a price on the feeling he gets from that first big, red, delicious homegrown tomato. There’s nothing like it.”
John Paul said his bounty some years is so great that he ends up giving some of it away, particularly zucchini and tomatoes.
This summer, though, the tomato plants have yet to produce much of a crop.
“I’m not sure why they are late. It’s probably because of the spring weather,” Paul said.
Whatever the harvest might bring, Elaine Paul said she is sure tending the garden and keeping active are big keys to her father’s long and happy life.
“I’m busy all the time. My hobbies are harder than when I was working,” John Paul said with a laugh. “But when I sit down, after 10 or 15 minutes I have to get up out of the chair.”
The garden will remain for as long as the Paul family is involved with the restaurant, Elaine Paul said.
“My dad said when he’s gone, the garden is the only tradition he cares about. He wants me to continue the garden no matter what,” she said.
Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
