The corridor leading to the House chamber had been transformed into staging grounds for the caterers, with huge serving tins of beets and green vegetables.
One perfectly balanced offering would have been better than a flawed three: leathery strips of bacon on warm spinach leaves, huge unmanageable lettuce leaves with beets, and overly astringent dressing on endive with blue cheese.
Cobb salad, available at lunch only, was another huge plate of assorted greens -- beet greens, frisée, tat soi and mizuna -- combined with grilled chicken strips, an abundance of bacon, hard-boiled egg halves, chopped tomatoes and avocado un der a shower of crumbled Gorgonzola.
Beets are enjoying a huge spike in culinary popularity.
Other good choices include chewy boiled beef in a zingy horseradish sauce ($10.25) and a huge portion of stuffed cabbage with beets and cucumber salad ($8.75).
Surrounded by sugar beet farms and trapped by a huge curve in the river Ouse, it was a village overshadowed by Europe's largest coal-fired power station (its chimney polluted Scandinavia) and flanked by the Selby coalfield.
Four huge, tasty seared sea scallops, for example, surrounded what the menu called a beet confit: a slice of beet beneath a clump of microgreens.
He takes huge slabs of bacon and stacks them with yellow and red beets, and adds prosciutto to monkfish.
There is ham and horseradish and pickled beets, and smoked beef tongue with pickled onions, along with huge gleaming tankards of beer.
