The menu at Lennie’s in Bloomington, Indiana includes a Wild Beet Spinach Salad with strawberries, beets, sugar-roasted pecans, red onions, tomato, and Caprini goat cheese.
Making the topic of “beets” a handy post-it note, we’ll first survey the background of Lennie’s.
In the very beginning, 40 years ago, business partners Jeff Mease and Lennie Busch launched Pizza Express (later shortened to Pizza X), which is going strong today with five locations in Bloomington. Then Mease and Busch formed One World Enterprises, and in 1989 opened Lennie’s, a full-service restaurant featuring gourmet pizza. It became an icon of Indiana University campus culture.
Louisville beer nuts know what happened next: Bloomington Brewing Company, established in 1994 during the infancy of Hoosier “microbrewing,” and attached to Lennie’s, which henceforth functioned as a “brewpub.” Later the brewery expanded to a production facility elsewhere. In 2019 Lennie’s made a lease-related move from 10th Street to 514 E. Kirkwood and ceased brewing on site; in early 2022 the brewing facility itself was sold.
But One World Enterprises abides and thrives, albeit in slightly modified form. The beers are still brewed by its new owners, and beet salad remains on the menu at Lennie’s.
All of this came to my mind because last week on social media, Jeff Mease posted an ode to the beet, as written by Tom Robbins as the amuse-bouche to his novel Jitterbug Perfume. You’ve probably seen it before, but here’s the complete passage.
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The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded,...Read more
