Maple Tree Inn in Homewood celebrated a huge milestone in 2025 that many restaurants don’t reach: 50 years in business.
The restaurant serves Cajun/Creole staples such as shrimp and grits and chicken, sausage and seafood jambalaya.
But for current owners Katie and Erich Wennberg, the Maple Tree Inn is more than a restaurant; it’s their life.
Born into it
Only two years after Charlie Orr, Katie’s father, opened the Maple Tree Inn, she was brought home from the hospital to their small apartment above the restaurant in Beverly in 1977.
After being inspired by a New Orleans chef making menudo on TV one New Year’s Eve, Orr changed the theme of the restaurant from American cuisine to Creole/Cajun in 1980.
While other kids were enjoying their weekends with friends or watching TV, Katie spent her time working at her family’s restaurant. At only 10 years old, she was cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms, washing dishes and busing tables. At 11, she received her first paycheck from the restaurant, earning $2.13 per hour.
“I felt it was unfair,” Katie said. “I was envious of my peers who had their weekends free.”
Her father was strict behind the scenes, but he needed help. At 12, she was a hostess while also learning the back office of the restaurant. At this point, it became second nature to her.
“Even by the age of 13, I felt very confident in the restaurant amidst the employees, doing whatever was asked of me,” she said.
By the time she was 16, she was the restaurant’s general manager, she said.
“I think a lot of people would look at that as being somewhat intimidating, as a 16-year-old, where some of the employees you’re working with are twice your age,” Katie said. “But for me, it didn’t feel that way. I knew the job that I had to do and I knew how to do it, and I knew how to do it well.”
Charlie Orr moved the restaurant to its historic Blue Island location in 1994.
After graduating from high school, Katie was working at the Maple Tree Inn and other restaurants full time to pay her way through Governors State University, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology
Co-owning the Maple Tree Inn
“Has anyone ever told you that you have the most beautiful eyes?” a bouncer said to a then-23-year-old Katie as she was leaving a bar in 2000.
She brushed him off, thinking it was a line he said to every woman. But more than eight months later, she ran into that same bouncer again at the same bar. He looked at her and said, “You’re the girl with beautiful eyes.”
Even 25 years later, Katie is flattered as she recalls this story with her now-husband, Erich Wennberg. They celebrated nine years of marriage in December.
She stopped working at the Maple Tree Inn around 2005 to focus on her graduate studies at Lewis University. But around early 2007, Katie’s father called and she came back to help.
She would clock in sometimes at midnight and stay until 4 a.m. to set the employees up for the day after interning as a high school guidance counselor.
After Katie’s graduation in 2008, the Wennbergs had to make a decision: Would Katie continue school and obtain a Ph.D. or would they purchase the Maple Tree Inn together?
Her father was sick and Katie was already running the restaurant while taking care of him, she said. After long talks, Katie and Erich agreed to buy a lease option with her father in 2008, which wasn’t a great deal, she said, since the restaurant was in desperate disrepair and business had dropped.
The couple was in a lease-to-buy arrangement with her father until his death in 2010, which made Katie the official owner of the restaurant.
“I think in my roughly 40 years in this working and owning the Maple Tree Inn, I think the biggest thing that we had to overcome was coming into a building in disrepair, a failing business and a handful of employees and making it work,” Katie said.
Erich had no experience in the business. At the time, he worked as a service writer for Nissan, but came in on the weekends to help Katie.
“The statistics said that I was 95% likely to fail within the first six months, and that if I didn’t fail, there was a 1% chance that I would match the success of the first generation, my father,” Katie said, her voice filled with emotion. “And then there was a less than 1% chance that I would be more successful than the first generation. And six months in, I doubled business. We had doubled business.”
In less than three years, the Wennbergs surpassed any level of success that her father had, she said, as more business was coming in.
The highs and lows
In 2018, about 10 years into owning the restaurant, OpenTable, an online reservation service, named the Maple Tree Inn one of the 50 best Southern restaurants in America.
The feeling was surreal for Katie; seeing the restaurant that she owned in conversations with others that she went to as a child.
“It felt like a fairy tale,” she said.
Erich felt more humbled than anything. For people to go to their restaurant and leave positive reviews was special.
“This is a testament to doing what we wanted to do, to surround ourselves with like-minded people and heart to serve and together we can move mountains, there’s the proof,” he said.
But weeks after being named one of the top 50 best Southern restaurants in the country, everything changed.
It was the night of Aug. 24, 2018. Katie said she remembers hearing a loud “boom” at about 11:30 p.m., but didn’t think much of it and went back to sleep.
Erich sleeps with a CPAP machine and noticed that it stopped working; the building had lost power. He went to check out what happened and noticed smoke coming into the apartment. He walked over to their office and saw light coming through the back door.
When he opened the door, a burst of flames came through, hitting the ceiling of the second-story apartment.
He yelled “get out” to Katie. She grabbed her dog and ran downstairs, where their neighbors were trying to get inside to help them.
Katie got outside, then turned back to look at her business and home being smothered in fire.
“Literally, two more minutes, we probably would not have survived,” Erich said.
Katie ran back into the building to retrieve her cat, Slick. Shortly after, a firefighter pulled her back outside because she was suffering the effects of smoke inhalation. She pleaded with firefighters to find her cat. About 10 minutes later a firefighter brought out Slick, who was originally brown and white, but was now black from soot.
Katie said over 80 firefighters were on the scene and took hours to put out the fire, which was ruled an accident. The Daily Southtown reported at the time that there were no injuries from the fire.
Naturally, it was heartbreaking for the owners.
“After all the work we put in, all the time, the blood, the sweat and tears, and I say that in a literal sense, that it was gone,” Katie said. “It was all just stripped away from us in one night.”
Now, they were without a home and a restaurant.
“It was one of the hardest days of our lives to watch everything that we had worked for, bled for and sacrificed for to just be eliminated in front of your eyes,” Erich said.
In under 90 days, they opened a temporary location in Blue Island and started serving food again. They operated out of the bistro for nearly a year until it closed in September 2019.
They were still focused on moving forward. They couldn’t rebuild a permanent location in Blue Island, Katie said, but Erich received a phone call from the mayor of Homewood offering assistance.
In February 2020, the Maple Tree Inn opened its current location in Homewood, serving hickory buttered barbecue shrimp, its signature dish, and other New Orleans-themed dishes.
50 years
The 50-year anniversary of the Maple Tree Inn was not easy to achieve for the Wennbergs. But when they processed what allowed them to celebrate half a century, they gave two answers: love and care.
Being able to serve people is the reason why he’s proud to still work at the restaurant.
“If you would have asked me six years ago ‘do you think that you’d go through this and be here?’ I would have told you you’re nuts, there’s no way,” he said. “But I can say, sitting here now, that I am truly grateful for all the experiences because it’s led us here. And here is being able to take care of people everyday and it’s something that we love to do.”
Katie credits love for the half-century achievement. Loving what they do, loving the customers, the employees and most importantly, she said, loving each other.
“Erich and I love each other beyond measure and that allows us to face any adversity head on, from losing our home and our restaurant simultaneously in one night, to working tirelessly to reopen the Maple Tree Inn in Homewood, only to be open for five weeks before being forced to close due to COVID,” Katie said. “And then there’s all the things before, after and in between. So as sentimental as it may sound, love is the reason we’re still here after all these years.”
18849 Dixie Highway, Homewood, 708-388-3461, mapletreeinnrestaurant.com