Ponce family closing DePue landmark Giant's Den

DEPUE — Angelica Ponce took over the restaurant for the betterment of her family, and closing it Saturday is a decision for her family, too.

Angie took over the Giant’s Den, a landmark in DePue, in 1989, not long after her husband lost his job when Mobil Chemical’s fertilizer plant closed.

She and husband Bob had three teen boys, and the company could have moved him to a job in Texas.

“I didn’t want to raise my kids in some big city I didn’t know,” said Angie, whose three sons graduated from DePue High School and retired after 20 years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Angelica isn’t sure exactly how long the Giant’s Den has served as a place to meet and eat in DePue, but said she believes it was there as a pool hall and hangout that served burgers for 30-40 years before she acquired it from Joe Garcia (pronounced Garsha, the local Spaniard immigrants’ pronunciation).

About 29 years ago, Angie already was working long and hard hours making doughnuts for Casey’s General Store and as a cook at the school.

“And Joe says why don’t you quit both jobs and buy my place so you don’t have to work two places?” she said while running the grill and doing prep work Tuesday.

Now 68, she plans to seek work after giving the Den a good cleaning.

“I’m hoping someone will want to run it,” she said.

But Bob, a 79-year-old Vietnam War combat veteran, still is helping her though she doesn’t think he should be working anymore.

On Tuesday, he was busing tables, providing some assistance in the kitchen, washing dishes, rinsing and smashing cans for recycling and chatting with the lunch crowd. In the early afternoon, he headed out to donate blood, because his O-positive blood is in high demand.

But she’s worried he’s losing his balance and maybe some of that is from his medications. He has fallen three times in the past year, and she doesn’t want him to get injured. She knows he won’t stop trying to help.

She still wants to work.

Through the years, she scaled back slightly, no longer having employees keep the place open 6 a.m.-10 p.m. Still this year, she has been open 5 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Saturday.

She said the Giant’s Den still attracts a regular crowd for breakfast, ranging from pancakes to chorizo and eggs, coffee, and lunch, ranging from barbecue sandwiches, meatloaf special and chopped steak and burgers to tacos and enchiladas. A sign on the harvest gold freezer near the entrance invites guests to have an ice cream cone.

The crowd changed slightly through the years. When their sons were in high school, it attracted a lot of kids and their friends, who’d play games and the jukebox. After DePue schools stopped having open campus at lunchtime, she took out the jukebox and had more of an adult crowd that liked it quieter.

At noon Tuesday — at a table near two montages of photos of DePue residents who served in Operation Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan — Lupe (Cruz) Lewis, formerly of DePue, brought two of her Peru neighbors, Anita Glatz and Nancy Grubich, for lunch. Glatz said in recent weeks she had just started coming to the Giant’s Den with Lewis, and fell in love with the tacos.

At a nearby table, Barb Belski and Linda Montez of DePue were drinking coffee and eating tarts while deciding what to order for lunch.

Belski said they’re “bummed” that they’re losing the place where they meet for lunch and often breakfast every day. Belski said she doesn’t know whether another place will be open every morning and afternoon in DePue.

“We’ll probably go to Spring Valley. We won’t go there every day though,” said Montez.

Barb joked, “I’ll get more house work done.”