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...Read more
