It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

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OUT TO LUNCH finds economist and Tulane finance professor Peter Ricchiuti conducting business New Orleans style: over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Olreans. In his 15th year in the host seat, Ricchiuti’s learned but uniquely NOLA informal perspective has established Out to Lunch as the voice of Crescent City business. You can also hear the show on WWNO 89.9FM.

  1. Jul 26

    News Is Next

    In the past week, podcast listeners to this show have come from across the US, Canada, Austria, the UK, and Spain. If you’re one of our far-flung podcast listeners, "Hello!" If you live in New Orleans, you might hear us on WWNO. In which case you will have probably heard, as part of the local news, reporters from The Gulf States Newsroom. The Gulf States Newsroom is an NPR-driven news-gathering collaboration of WWNO, WRKF in Baton Rouge, and NPR stations in Alabama and Mississippi. It was launched in 2020, by NPR and the Corporation For Public Broadcasting. In 2025, the Corporation For Public Broadcasting was de-funded by Congress and no longer exists. Those same budget cuts ate into the financial viability of all public broadcasting outlets – including the member stations of the Gulf States Newsroom - forcing them to scramble to come up with strategies to stay funded. You can’t accuse the Deep South of being ahead of the game in much, but in the case of The Gulf States Newsroom, back in 2022 they’d hired Marci Schramm as their Director of Development, an HR term that roughly translates to, “The person we all depend on to go out and find money to fund this thing.” Marci’s background included 9 years as Executive Director of New Orleans’ French Quarter Festival – the years that saw its most explosive growth – and that’s when we first met her here on Out to Lunch, in 2016. Today, Marci ensures the Gulf States Newsroom continues to run at full capacity as it earns numerous prestigious Edward R Murrow Awards for journalism. When you watch the news on TV, you’re quite often looking at film of people in life and death situations in other countries, and sometimes in other cities in the US. If you live in New Orleans, you’ve probably had the unnerving experience of relying on this kind of news footage to assess the risk to your own life at the hands of a hurricane or flood. It’s essential here to have a TV news station you can trust. It’s too late for a news outlet to earn that kind of trust the day before a storm blows into town and for that reason, despite our reputation as “The City That Care Forgot,” we take local news reporting seriously in New Orleans. WWL TV is one of the oldest television stations in the South. Tod Smith began working there as a production assistant in 1980 while he was a student at Loyola University – which at that time owned WWL. Tod graduated from college, worked for a while for Shell Oil, went back to TV and was Sales Manager at WWL in the 1990’s, then went into management at stations in Arizona and Virginia before coming back home to take over as General Manager of WWL TV in 2012. He’s still the station’s General Manager today. People will tell you they’re a cat person or a dog person. They’re mountain people or beach people. And then there are NPR listeners and – believe it or not - people who have never-even-one-time listened to public radio.You can’t hate those folks – they don’t know what they’re missing. But we NPR listeners absolutely know what we’d be missing if public radio went away. So, we’re all exceptionally grateful to Marci Schramm for everything she does every day to keep public radio news on the air. And with a legacy that includes Nash Roberts, Garland Robinette, Eric Paulsen, Sally Ann Roberts, Angela Hill, Hap Glaudi, and Morgus the Magnificent, WWL-TV is a part of the history of modern New Orleans. As General Manager of the station, Tod Smith is a part of that history now too. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    News Is Next

  2. Jul 12

    Vacation Tattoo Removal

    If you live in New Orleans, you’ve probably had this happen: A friend gets in touch and says they’re coming to town for something to do with their work. Usually a convention. They’ll be in touch when they get here and know their schedule. The next communication you get is an apology. They’re on the way home. They went to Bourbon Street their first night here, and everything else is kind of a blur. That doesn’t do a lot for your friendship. And their bleary-eyed, dragging, hung-over 3 days at the conference didn’t do a lot for their professional standing either. Vacation What if your friend could have done this a whole other way? What if making the most of New Orleans was integrated into a visit, so it becomes a part of the professional, work-related reason a business- person comes here? That’s, broadly, the concept behind Lelia Gowland’s business, Strategic Vacations. Strategic Vacations is a business consultancy for purpose-driven women and non-binary leaders in business, with a very New Orleans perspective. It’s a New Orleans vacation that balances the benefit of getting away from it all with strategic planning and personal consultancy - so attendees get their professional and personal priorities right. Tattoo Removal Now, back to your friend who hadn’t heard about Strategic Vacations – the one who’s stumbling around the French Quarter. Maybe at some point in the evening, after a second Hurricane and a Big Ass Beer, your friend might have the brilliant idea of getting a tattoo. Some tattoos are awesome. They have cultural significance, or they mean something special to the person wearing them. But time has a way of changing your opinions and circumstances. And if either of those change and your tattoo doesn’t, what seemed like a good idea at the time is now a permanent reminder of a regrettable decision. Well, the good news about that is, even if you can’t erase the memory, you can now erase the tattoo. As easily as you wandered into the tattoo shop, you can now wander into the tattoo removal shop. It’s called Removery. It’s on Magazine Street. It’s also in 162 other locations across the US, Canada, and Australia, and it’s expanding to Europe. Removery is the biggest dedicated tattoo removal company in the world. Its Co-Founder and Vice President of Clinical Advancement is Carmen Brodie. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Vacation Tattoo Removal

  3. Jun 21

    Prosperall The Alternative

    There’s a reason you’re familiar with Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie A Few Good Men yelling, “You can’t handle the truth!” Partly it’s because of the intensity of Nicholson’s performance, but mostly it’s because it’s a hard-hitting piece of universal reality: A lot of the time we’d rather not know the truth. It can be as bland as the ubiquitous, “How are you?” When you ask somebody that, you don’t really  want their verified health summary. Similarly, when someone asks, “How’s business?” the expected answer is, “Great!” If you’re on the verge of bankruptcy you might answer, “Hey we’re hangin’ in.” The problem is, “Fake it till you make it” doesn’t always work. Sometimes in business, as in other aspects of life, the only way you can change and grow is if you deal with the truth. A business consultant or a board of directors will typically only go so far in that regard. And that’s the reason David Purvis started up The Alternative Board in New Orleans. The Alternative Board is exactly what it says: an alternative to a typical board of directors. It’s more like a business support group. A business owner joins a group of other business owners They meet regularly, have honest conversations about their issues, and draw on their experiences to critique and help each other. The Alternative Board is an international organization. It’s in 22 countries. It has contributed to the success of more than 25,000 businesses over the past 30 years and members of the organization reportedly grow their businesses two-and-a-half times faster than the national average. David Purvis launched the New Orleans branch after a successful 36 year career as an engineer and executive in the oil and gas business. Even if you don’t have a business yourself, you’ve more than likely had to do business at some point with the city, or municipality you live in. Whether that’s here in New Orleans, or pretty much any other city in the country, you’ve more than likely been amazed at the apparent dysfunction and bureaucratic b.s. you have to go through to get anything accomplished. Here in New Orleans, our everyday stories are legendary about road repair, street lighting, building permits, burst water mains, boil water advisories, and the list goes on. Here’s a true story. On a street near my house, the city dug up the whole street and sidewalk and repaired and re-paved it. It was beautiful. For about a month. Then some other city contractor came along and dug up a section of the sidewalk. Now a sheet of plywood covers that bit. It’s been like that for 9 months and now the plywood’s beginning to rot. I know you’ve got a similar story. We all do. But, imagine living in a city where this kind of dysfunction doesn’t happen. That is what Sevetri Wilson Taylor’s company, Prosperall, is setting out achieve. Prosperall is an AI-driven platform that lets cities and municipalities consolidate data across departments so that disconnected systems that were never designed to talk to each other, communicate and coordinate. Sevetri Co-Founded Prosperall in 2025 and it’s already at work in 11 cities, including New Orleans. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, or how successful you are, all of us to one degree or another believe that however well we’re doing now, we can do better. Whether it’s about making more money for yourself, or making life better for somebody else, the desire to do better - at least in the Western world - is probably one of the biggest motivators of human activity. Sevetri and David are both focused on making things better. For lots of people. David is focused on making things better for people in business. Sevetri is focused on making things better for everybody – everybody who lives and works in a city. It takes a special balance of drive and selflessness to pull off what each of them are doing. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Prosperall The Alternative

  4. Jun 14

    Propeller and Friends

    If you’ve lived in New Orleans for any length of time, you know we love to rebuild. We rebuilt the levees. We rebuilt the schools. We rebuilt the Superdome. After every storm, we rebuild thousands of roofs and hundreds of homes. After Hurricane Katrina, a small group of New Orleanians decided that the way they could make a contribution toward saving the city was to help build companies. They revived a small volunteer-run organization called Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans. Three years later they turned it into a registered non-profit and gave it a new name. They called it, “Propeller.” The idea was - Find people in New Orleans who had identified a problem in their community and were trying to build a business or nonprofit to fix it. Get these folks in a room. Teach them how to read a balance sheet, how to apply for a grant, how to write a marketing plan, how to hire a bookkeeper. Then turn them loose. It worked. Today, Propeller is a business accelerator and co-working space that has seen more than 300 ventures go through its program. Those companies have generated over $290 million in revenue and external financing, and they’ve created more than 485 full and part-time jobs in the city. The CEO of Propeller is Jessica Allen. If you happened to watch HGTV in 2024, you may have caught a series called “Bargain Block: New Orleans.” It was a New Orleans spinoff of HGTV’s Detroit-based home renovation show.  The two hosts had design ambitions. The person on the show who turned those ambitions into actual buildings, walls, and floors was a New Orleans general contractor named Charles Aponza. Charles came to New Orleans in 2012 to teach in the Recovery School District. He bought a fixer-upper, restored it himself, and then friends started asking him to help with their houses. In 2015 he turned his home building skills into a business - Brighter Horizons Construction.  Charles and Brighter Horizons came up through Propeller’s Impact Accelerator. Then there’s the other side of what comes out of Propeller. A nonprofit. In 2014, Kimberly Novod and her husband Aaron were expecting their first child. Their son Saul was born prematurely at 28 weeks. He spent 20 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He died there. Kimberly has said publicly that the question she was left with was, “What do I do with all the love?” Her answer was Saul’s Light – a New Orleans nonprofit she founded to support NICU families and bereaved families across Louisiana. Today, Saul’s Light serves around 200 Louisiana families a year.Beyond emotional support, they provide financial assistance. And as an advocacy group, Saul’s Light has   produced two Louisiana state laws – a tax credit for stillborn children, and a requirement that health insurance, including Medicaid, cover prescription human milk. There’s a tendency, when we talk about business in New Orleans, to default to conversations about tourism, hospitality, Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras… The fun stuff. We don’t hear so much about the social justice economy: people who are building businesses and organizations to fix things that are broken. At Propeller they put that work at the center of their existence. Charles came up through Propeller and grew a construction business that builds homes New Orleanians can actually afford. Kimberly came up through Propeller and built an organization that helps 200 families a year go through one of the hardest things a person can experience. As in music, sometimes in business the silence is as powerful as the conversation. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Propeller and Friends

  5. Jun 7

    THC Tarps

    There are two things we know a lot about in New Orleans: partying and hurricanes. For a long time those weren't unrelated. The hurricane party was a New Orleans institution — you'd ride out the storm with your neighbors, a case of beer, and a sense of invincibility. These days, after Katrina and Ida, hurricanes aren't quite the occasion they used to be. But there's still a connection between the two — just a more businesslike one. Now, the connection shows up after the storm, not during it. When you drive around New Orleans after a big storm, you see a lot of blue roofs. They’re tarps. When you drive around any other time, you see houses draped in tarps in other colors, covering houses that are being fumigated, mostly for termites. All of these tarps, plus many others used in places like grain ships, in transporting seafood, and for keeping ammunition weather-proof for the US military, are manufactured in Ponchatoula by a New Orleans company – J&M Industries. The Managing Owner and President of J&M Industries is Maurice Gaudet IV. After the hurricane’s blown through and you get back to partying, there’s another local manufacturer you might want to know about. The company and their product are both called Louie Louie. Louie Louie are cans of effervescent drinks, in flavors like Hurricane Punch, Ginger Cucumber and Blackberry Lemon. But it’s more than the flavor that sets these drinks apart from a regular seltzer. Louie Louie describes itself as a, “cannabis infused beverage.” Each can has 5 milligrams of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis that, when you smoke it, gets you high. And 5 milligrams of CBD, the cannabis derivative that promotes relaxation. When you drink Louie Louie it’s reportedly quicker acting and not as long lasting as eating a gummy and, according to the company’s marketing, gives the drinker “a relaxed buzz.” Marie LaFrance is a Co-Founder of Louie Louie. Anyone who has had any contact with the news media over the last decade has heard politicians from every party and at every level – federal, state, and local – talk about "manufacturing." Once you hear that word, the next part of the conversation is usually about China, Canada, the Midwest or northeast of the US. It’s very rare, if ever, that you hear about manufacturing in New Orleans. And yet, here we are. J&M Industries has been around for over 50 years and are are showing no signs of slowing down. Louie Louie has been only been around a few years and every indication is they’re just getting started. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    THC Tarps

  6. May 24

    Kitchen Closet

    Although each of us is free to believe whatever we want, when it comes to our personal finances, we tend to operate with a number of shared beliefs. One of these is the belief in the benefit of ownership. For example, it’s better to own your own business than be an employee. Financially, that benefit is not necessarily true. Many startup business owners go for years before they even pay themselves at all. And many employees make a lot of money. Emotionally and psychologically, though, it’s a different story. Because happiness is, by definition, how you feel – owning your own business can be the greatest thing ever - if you feel good about the inevitable challenges it brings. Both of Peter's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch have taken the leap from employee to owner. And both of them have businesses that are dependent not just on their business acumen, but also on their singular talent and taste. Sue Zemanick started her career in New Orleans in 2003 as a chef at Commander’s Palace. By 2005 she was Executive Chef at Gautreau’s in Uptown New Orleans. In 2013 Chef Sue won a James Beard Award for “Best Chef, South.” In 2019 she opened her own restaurant in Mid City, called Zasu. In 2025, Zasu earned the Olympic Gold Medal of hospitality, a Michelin Star. Zasu is one of only a handful of restaurants to earn Louisiana's first-ever Michelin stars — and the only one run by a woman. Margaret Sche came to New Orleans from Los Angeles where she had been a fashion stylist, merchandiser and trend forecaster. Margaret was surprised to find there wasn’t a women’s fashion store here that was truly reflective of the style of the city, and the flair of its female fashionistas. She corrected that gap in the market with a store, called The Saint Claude Social Club. Today, the store is called The Closet by Saint Claude Social Club, and it has a whole different business model. It’s a fashion rental store – a real-world version of online fashion rental businesses like Rent The Runway and Nuuly, but with a local-focus. It has a curated collection of fashion ranging from Mardi Gras ballgowns to vintage finds that Margaret picks up in Paris. When you start your own business making widgets, you hope to eventually get to a point where the widget factory rolls along and keeps making money even when you’re at Disney World. But when you start a business that depends entirely on you – like your own restaurant or a curated fashion boutique - you’re not just making widgets. You’re creating experiences for other people. People don’t eat in a Michelin Star restaurant just to get enough carbs to get through the next 8 hours. And they don’t go to a curated fashion boutique to find clothes just to keep warm. The types of businesses Sue and Margaret are running demand the same kind of business skills as it takes to run a widget factory, and a whole lot more. Their businesses wouldn’t exist without their particular talents, creativity, and imagination. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Kitchen Closet

  7. May 17

    Visible and Invisible New Orleans

    I want to start out today by running through a few notable New Orleans landmarks:The new terminal at Louis Armstrong Airport. The U.S Custom House.The gold/copper skin on the Superdome.The Civic Theater.The W New Orleans French Quarter Hotel.The Xavier University Dormitories. There are a whole lot more on this list too. If you’re wondering what the link is between all of them, it’s the construction company that built them, or in some cases re-built them. It’s a 50 year old family firm, called Gibbs Construction. Gibbs Construction was founded in 1976, by Larry Gibbs. 43 years later, In 2019, Larry’s daughter, Lauren, took over as owner and CEO of the company. Now, here’s a list of other New Orleans buildings. See if you can tell me what these have in common:The LaLaurie Mansion on Royal Street.The Hermann-Grima House.Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop.The Andrew Jackson Hotel.The Old Ursuline Convent. If you’re a New Orleanian, you’re probably saying, with as much nonchalance and more confidence than you have in today’s weather forecast, “Oh yeah, they’re all haunted.” Along with the French Quarter, fabulous food, and live music, the supernatural vibe that is a natural part of New Orleans is an element of the city people come here to experience. Most tourists – and locals by the way – learn about our haunted history courtesy of the oldest and largest ghost tour business in New Orleans - a company called, Haunted History Tours. Haunted History was co-founded in 1994 by partners Sidney and Kalila Smith. Today, Kalila is the sole owner of the company. Kalila is a leading authority on the subject of supernatural New Orleans. She’s the author of multiple books, including New Orleans Ghosts, Voodoo & Vampires, and Tales From The French Quarter. Her many TV appearances include CNN, Fox News, The Today Show, The Travel Channel and Discovery. She was a contributor to Sony's PlayStation II game Ghosthunter, and produced a PBS documentary on Southern hauntings. Visible & Invisible A lot of businesses have a lot in common. But some don’t. About the only way anybody could run a complex, multi-million dollar construction company is by having years of experience in the industry, which in Lauren's case she got to some degree by growing up in it. On the other hand, what’s made Kalila's business successful is the very opposite of continuity – it’s the ability to do something nobody had done before she came along and created it. Lauren and Kalila are wonderful examples of the multi-dimensional tapestry of our unique New Orleans economy, and vastly different but equally important contributors to it. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    Visible and Invisible New Orleans

  8. May 10

    After The Revolution

    If you’re under 30, and you have any kind of original, innovative ideas, you might not know that before you were born people like you generally left New Orleans and went to places where forward-thinking was appreciated. Then, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina had knocked the city to its knees, the river of intellectuals and social activists started to flow in other direction. All kinds of smart people with new ideas started coming here. Two of them were young guys who arrived as part of the revolution in education. Jonas Chartock was CEO of an organization called Leading Educators. Matt Candler was CEO of an organization called New Schools For New Orleans, and then Founder of an education startup called 4.0 Schools. Like pretty much everything else in New Orleans at the time, our schools and our entire education system was in ruins. In a period we can now look back on as something of an Enlightenment, Jonas, Matt, and a generation of educators completely re-imagined our education system and built what was both an education laboratory and beacon for the nation. In 2016 Jonas and Matt were guests on Out to Lunch. They were fired up about the education revolution they were a part of leading. Today’s Out to Lunch is a reunion. Ten years and some-odd on, Jonas and Matt are still revolutionaries. Matt is building electric motorbikes under the banner of Night Shift Bikes. And he’s helping build a number of other battery-based companies as General Partner of an investment fund called The Batteries Included Fund. Jonas is CEO of The Childrens Bureau of New Orleans. It’s a non-profit that provides primarily mental health support for children who have experienced a traumatic event. That support is in the form of immediate crisis intervention, and longer-term, evidence-based therapies for children and families impacted by trauma. people come and go out of your life. You’re friends for a while, maybe you were even close friends or partners – but things change, life goes on, and one way or another you drift apart. That person might not be a central part of your life any more they way they were, but your relationship with them had an affect on you, and when you run into them these days it’s still good to see them. It can even be like old times and you pick up right where you left off. It’s kind of the same for the City of New Orleans’ relationship with Matt and Jonas. They might not be the central revolutionary savior figures they were when you first rolled into town, but they’re still here. Their contributions to the education revolution continue to ripple through the system in various ways, and their current contributions to the city are not insignificant either. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    After The Revolution
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About

OUT TO LUNCH finds economist and Tulane finance professor Peter Ricchiuti conducting business New Orleans style: over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Olreans. In his 15th year in the host seat, Ricchiuti’s learned but uniquely NOLA informal perspective has established Out to Lunch as the voice of Crescent City business. You can also hear the show on WWNO 89.9FM.

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