It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch itsneworleans.com

When somebody suggests going out for a beer, you know what that means. Or, rather, you know what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean meeting up for a single beer.

And after you’ve had a few beers at whichever place you decided to meet, at some point somebody will suggest moving on and going to get another beer – or two – at someplace else.

The problem with this plan is, nobody should be driving a car at this point. And ride-sharing isn’t as cheap as it used to be. That’s why Elizabeth Bates launched her business, Beer Bus.

Beer Bus is a hop-on-hop-off bus line that serves New Orleans craft breweries on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. It’s been running since the end of 2023 and when you pay your $10 – or $30 for unlimited rides – you can check the Beer Bus website to see where the bus is and when it will be by if you want to hop on and try another brewery.

Elizabeth Bates is not just the founder of Beer Bus, she’s also the bus driver.

If you’ve spent any time in the UK or around British people, you’ll be familiar with the sentence, “What you need is a nice cup of tea.”

Whether there’s been a death in the family, your car broke down, or maybe you’ve gotten a giant bill you don’t know how you’re going to pay… Whatever the calamity that’s befallen you, the default old-fashioned British remedy is, “a nice cup of tea.”

Well, it turns out, like many pieces of folk wisdom, there’s actually some truth to the healing power of tea. That’s the basis of Portia Cooper’s business, NOLA Botanical Tea.

Portia makes specific concoctions of various strains of tea to treat particular physical ailments. There’s ginger root, elderberry, chamomile, hibiscus, and others that Portia says will remedy stress, reduce inflammation, boost your immune system, boost your energy, and much more.

Normally if we say we’re going around in circles, we’re implying we’re doing the same thing over and over again and getting nowhere. But when going around in a circle is a ride on the Beer Bus - taking us from one New Orleans craft Brewery to another - we may physically end up where we started, but the ride has been anything but unproductive.

On the other hand, if you have a recurring medical complaint that’s not life threatening but never seems to totally go away, you really do feel like you’re going around in circles. Maybe adding medicinal tea to your treatment would help.

Whether you’re drinking New Orleans beer or New Orleans tea, it’s a triple bottom line – good for the mind, body and local business.  

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Blake Langlinais at itsneworleans.com.

 
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One of the conundrums about being human is, we strive for happiness, but when something makes us happy we grow accustomed to it and, usually sooner than later, we’re looking for something else to make us happy.

Whether it’s your income, your appearance, your career, or anything else in your life that can be improved, we’re trapped on what social scientists call The Hedonic Treadmill.  It’s why we buy new clothes, try new diets, take up new hobbies, why we travel, drink, take drugs… and you can list a bunch of other things that make you happy. Until they don’t.

Well, what if you could get off the hedonic treadmill? What if you could find something you liked so much – say, a piece of jewelry – that makes you feel so good that you can commit to wearing it forever.

That’s the concept behind a jewelry business on Magazine Street called Love Weld.  They sell what they describe as “permanent jewelry.”

In the store, a customer designs a bracelet, necklace, anklet, ring, or charms, and the people at Love Weld fit it and weld it, so it’s on forever.

The Sudio Lead at Love Weld is Sarah Sylve.

If permanent happiness sounds ambitious, a little further down from Love Weld on Magazine Street you can make yourself feel better for an hour - and for days after - at NOLA Massage.

NOLA Massage specializes in therapeutic massage, and you can also get a bunch of other treatments including detoxifying body wraps, a salt scrub, cryo treatments, and cupping.

The owner - and one of 4 massage therapists at NOLA Massage - is Amy Nicole Stewart.

Like a lot of things in New Orleans, it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s so special about Magazine Street. Basically, it’s nothing more than a relatively narrow street, not especially well landscaped, lined with stores. But, somehow, the street has a unique energy and a charismatic charm. It’s a street where locals shop, and tourists get a genuine taste of New Orleans and New Orleanians.

Anyone can open a store on Magazine Street. But not just anyone does. The street seems to attract store owners who manage to combine individual flair with general functionality. Amy's and Sarah's businesses, NOLA Massage and Love Weld, are two of the most recent to have opened on Magazine Street. They both make a unique contribution to the street’s rich retail mosaic.

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.

Check out Amy's children's book about Shotgun Kitties, a bunch of musical New Orleans cats, in their debut outing, Bill Bailey Please Come Home.
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There’s a term in theater called “meta.” It’s used to describe a scenario where actors call attention to the fact they’re performing. For example, the play within a play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Except for the name of the company that used to be Facebook, we don’t have a similar term to “meta” in business. But we do have a similar concept. We have businesses that make other businesses do better business. And we have businesses that help individuals conduct business better.

One of the most common business contracts most of us navigate in everyday life is a rental or lease agreement - for a house or apartment. Signing a lease is a seemingly simple act of appending a signature. But it is in fact deceptively difficult, both for the renter and the manager of the rental property.

It gets especially problematic at the end of the rental period when the renter wants their deposit back and the manager claims they can’t refund it because of the damage the renter caused to the property during the term of the lease. This is precisely why Marco Nelson and his partner created RentCheck.

RentCheck is an app that a rental agency, a landlord, or a renter can use when they sign a new rental agreement. It records the rental details and, probably most importantly, photos of the property which can be compared to photos of the property when the rental period ends. There is definitive proof - in the date-stamped, cloud-based app - of what damage was there when the renter moved in, and what wasn’t.

Marco and his partner founded RentCheck in New Orleans in 2019.  Today they have 24 employees. RentCheck is used by 700 property managers in the US and Canada, and manages a total of 500,000 properties.

Marco and Peter first spoke in 2020 when RentCheck was getting rolling and we were doing Out to Lunch on Zoom because of the pandemic.

Kristen Dufauchard grew up in New Orleans - and left for 20 years. During the time she was gone, Kristen was Associate Director of Communications for New York University and Global Marketing Lead for the market measurement company, Nielsen, where she focused on DEI and multi-cultural consumer trends.

Kristen moved back to New Orleans in 2022 and discovered there are a bunch of folks back home who could use the kind of expertise she’d picked up over the previous two decades. So, she founded a corporate marketing, event planning, and training firm called aKrewe NOLA – krewe is spelled the New Orleans way – and a networking platform called The Business Exchange, where diverse professionals can make new connections, exchange ideas, and support each other.

In a statistic that might make the point about how much New Orleans changed while Kristen was gone, The Business Exchange has 1,500 members – entrepreneurs, creatives, and innovators who identify as Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, or women.

There was a time in New Orleans, and not so long ago, when the term “entrepreneurial ecosystem” sounded about as exotic as lobster rolls or bubble tea. Now you can get lobster rolls and bubble tea every day in New Orleans, and we most definitely have a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem.

RentCheck is a great example of the type of nationwide success that’s grown out of our entrepreneurial community, and helped shape it. And aKrewe NOLA and The Business Exchange are building on the city’s first-generation entrepreneurial foundation, taking it to more places and including more people.

Thanks to the efforts and talents of people like both Marco and Kristen and the success of their companies, New Orleans is continuing to be a great place to start and grow a business.

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.
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If you’re a theater kid in high school and decide that’s what you want to do with the rest of your life, you’re familiar with the moment you tell your family you’re taking out college loans to major in theater.

Even your most supportive parent can’t hide a fleeting grimace as they think, “You may see yourself becoming a great writer or actor but the only role you’re writing for yourself is a person whose actual career will be waiting tables.”

Jenni

Jenni Daniel started down this path. In fact, she went a long way down it. Jenni has an MA in Theater, from the University of London.

Before she got too far into table-waiting, Jenni got another post-graduate degree. This one was an MBA from the A.B.Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.

Today, Jenni is Vice President of Institutional Advancement at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In an organization of 29 staff members who work to financially support access to arts, culture, education and history in Louisiana, Jenni’s responsible for private and corporate fundraising. And she manages the marketing team.

Jenna

Dr. Jenna Winston, went to Tulane too.

Jenna had the foresight to study a subject that leads to a professional career. She earned a Ph.D in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. When Jenna graduated from college, what did she do? She went into theater!

Jenna is the founder of New Orleans Youth Theater, made up of theater kids between the ages of 4-18. And it’s a rare type of theater company – nobody has to audition to get in. Any kid who wants to attend is accepted. If they can’t afford the approximately $400 per semester tuition, the theater will help with a needs-based scholarship.

Jenna founded New Orleans Youth Theater in 2022. Members of the company learn voice, dance and acting, and perform full-length musicals. And, despite what you might assume, New Orleans Youth Theater is not a non-profit. It’s a legit, for-profit business that makes legit theater.

Louisiana Chronicles

The relationship between New Orleans and Louisiana is unique. In most other cities in the US, people naturally append the name of the state to the name of their hometown. Austin Texas. Miami Florida. Denver Colorado. You very rarely hear anyone here describe our city as anything other than, simply, New Orleans.

That’s because, if there is a typical Louisiana city, New Orleans isn’t it. Actually, it’s hard to put your finger on what a typical Louisiana city or town would be. The lifestyles and culture in places like Alexandria and Shreveport are vastly different from other communities, like Eunice or Venice.

Celebrating these differences and weaving them into a commonality among all of us in the 64 parishes of Louisiana is what the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities is all about. And celebrating the differences among a vast array of New Orleans kids and melding them into a common purpose of artistic expression is what New Orleans Youth Theater is all about.

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.
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Dr Nicolas Bazan is a world-renowned neuroscientist with a research lab in Stockholm Sweden and another here in New Orleans. When Dr Bazan was a guest on Out to Lunch, he pointed out that, compared to other fields of medicine, treatment for conditions of the human brain are at a primitive stage. For example, the current standard of care for Traumatic Brain Injury is “rest.”

Part of the reason there’s no medication for neurological conditions like dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons is the way pharmacological research is conducted.

For obvious reasons, there are rigorous controls on the development of neurological drugs before they’re allowed to be tested on humans. The only new medications that are allowed to be trialed by humans are ones that have proven safe in trials on animals. But an astounding 94% of these neurological drugs fail - because preclinical results on animals can’t predict results in humans.

It’s with this is mind that Lowry Curley founded his revolutionary biomedical research company, AxoSim. AxoSim simulates brain cells, so drug developers can try out a drug on a human brain without having an actual human being attached to it.

We last talked to Lowry when this was all just getting off the ground, in 2016, a couple of years after the company was founded in New Orleans. Today, AxoSim has two laboratories, 30 employees, 3 separate research divisions, and a bunch of industry-leading patents.

The human brain is a delicate organ. That’s why it’s housed in a hard case: the skull. But there are some activities where even the skull and a protective helmet aren’t enough to prevent the brain from getting injured. One of those activities is military combat.

Veterans who lose limbs in combat have established pathways to recovery. But veterans with brain injury, spinal cord injury, or other neurological conditions can go undiagnosed. Veterans who struggle with these issues find themselves isolated and lonely – part of the reason for the high rate of veteran suicide.

Here in New Orleans a program called Headway is setting out to solve these issues by placing affected veterans in a purpose-built housing development, called Bastion Community of Resilience.

It's a $14m, five-and-a-half acre neighborhood of homes in Gentilly in which veterans with neurological wounds live among other veterans, and volunteers.

We spoke with the founder of Bastion, Dylan Tete, back in 2016 when the site was under construction. Today Bastion is a living neighborhood and we’re joined by it’s Executive Director, Jackson Smith.

For a medium-sized city in the south of the United States, New Orleans gets a lot of publicity.

Most of it - even when it’s generated by our own city and state agencies - focuses on what a great place New Orleans is to eat, drink, and listen to music.

And, it is. But we’re so much more than that. One of these days maybe we’ll also be recognized for being the home of AxoSim, a company that’s revolutionizing neurological medical research, and the Bastion Community of Resilience, pioneering healthcare and the welfare of military veterans.

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.
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The city of New Orleans is in Orleans Parish. For reasons that are mainly economic and infrastructure-related, Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish are inter-dependent. 

The two parishes are very different. The rivalry between them isn’t on the scale of the Saints and the Flacons, but it’s definitely real. If you live in Jefferson Parish, the basic perception is, “Sure, New Orleans has great restaurants and music clubs but it’s dangerous, dirty, and dysfunctional.” If you live in New Orleans, the perception is, “Sure, everything works in Jefferson Parish, but it’s sterile and soulless.”

Nothing illustrates the real-world differences between the parishes better than the business stories of this editon of Out to Lunch's two guests.

The Tale

In Jefferson Parish, the heart of the retail economy is Veterans Boulevard. There used to be a bowling alley on Veterans, called Paradise Lanes. In 1995 it was knocked down and replaced by a Barnes & Noble bookstore. The owners of the bowling alley retained a retail space in the New Barnes & Noble building. They called their new store Paradise Cafe & Gifts.

21 years later, in 2016, two of the owner’s granddaughters, sisters Jenny McGuinness and Jessica Woodward, along with their mom, Linda Dalton, transformed the store into a home accessories and gift shop, and called it Phina.

Next, they opened two more Phina stores – one on Metairie Road and another on Harrison Avenue. In 2023 they bought a company called The Basketry, that specializes in personal and corporate gift baskets. Today the combined companies have 50 employees and business is booming. 

Our story from Orleans Parish is equally successful. It’s based on a single word. A word that, if you live in Orleans Parish, has enormous practical and symbolic meaning: Potholes.

Nothing typifies the perception of the dysfunction of the city of New Orleans like the pot-holed state of our streets. In 2019, an anonymous person started an Instagram account illustrating the sorry condition of our streets. The name of the account is the sentence many New Orleanians say or think as they drive or bike around town, Look at This Effin Street. (On Instagram "effin" is the f-word. Because none of our podcasts are explicit we're sticking with "effin" to avoid the bot-police.)

The Look at This Effin’ Street Instagram account was an instant success. People started contributing photos of New Orleans streets and today the account has over 120,000 followers – including by the way, The City of New Orleans.

How do you monetize this kind of social media success? You can’t exactly sell potholes. But you can sell merch about potholes. And that’s what the anonymous founder of Look at This Effin Street did. He contracted with a local merch company, InkMule, to make stickers, baseball caps, T-shirts and other pot-hole merch.

The anonymous business-person behind this successful social-media driven venture is still anonymous. On this edition of Out to Lunch we referring to him as Effin Street.

Two Parishes

Next time you’re driving along Veterans Boulevard, Harrison Avenue, or Metairie Road, you might notice one of the three Phina stores. But you probably won’t think anything at all about the street you’re driving on.

If you keep driving east from there on surface streets, you’ll cross the parish line into Orleans Parish. At that point you may well find yourself remarking, “Look at this effin’ street.”

Jenny and Effin Street's respective experiences are model examples of the differences between Orleans and Jefferson parishes. But their histories and businesses are also representative of the synergy that exists between the two parishes and the people who live, work and play in both of them.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns on St. Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Blake Langlinais at itsneworleans.com.

 
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