Last meal with Jeannie Pierola

Before Jeannie Pierola built a restaurant empire with Edison: Food + Drink Lab, she grew up eating Cuban-Spanish food on Anna Maria Island.

• The four-time James Beard semifinalist said she lost more than $600,000 during the pandemic, but her restaurants survived and she's still making amazing food.

We're dying to know: What would Pierola eat for her last meal?

• "I know the answer to the question as sure as I'm standing in my house right now," she says. "My favorite meal on the planet would be two courses."

The first: A 1905 salad and La Segunda Central warm Cuban bread from The Columbia served with a white Burgundy wine.

• "It's the best salad on the planet. … Everybody made that salad when we were growing up. But that 1905 salad is poetry to me."

The second: A breaded Palomilla steak like her mother used to make and her grandmother's black beans served with a Spanish red wine.

• "My grandmother made the best black beans of all time. For someone who cooked Cuban food, she spent a lot of time in New Orleans with a lot of French cooks and applied a lot of French technique to her black beans. To me, black beans and rice, plantains and a breaded steak, that would be the thing to go to sleep to."

For dessert: Wright's Deli's chocolate peanut butter cake.

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