It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch

In Louisiana alligators are everywhere. From Bourbon Street T-shirts to bowls of rice and sauce piquant in Lafayette. Although the alligator isn't the official emblem of the state, if you own a car in Louisiana, there’s a good chance you’re driving around with a license plate that says, “Sportsman’s Paradise.”  What's that got do with alligators? Well, leaving as...

The women’s movement has been striving to define the place of women in the workplace, and in society in general, since the 1960’s. Although there have been some major turning points over the past half century, the era we’re in now may turn out to be one of the most significant and long lasting. In New Orleans, two very different women driven media businesses are contributing to t...

There was a time in New Orleans, that if you told someone you were moving into your new office, it was probably in Houston. Or Atlanta. In the 1990’s, whole office buildings in New Orleans were empty. Leasing companies were in a reverse-bidding war - under-selling each other to attract tenants. A significant number of store-fronts downtown and on Magazine Street were boarded up. And that was...

You may not be consciously aware of it, but you’re constantly making decisions. Many of these decisions are in the service of sorting out the truth of what's going on around you. Starting with deciding it’s time to get up in the morning, till you decide it’s time to go to bed at night, you’re making hundreds, if not thousands of these types of decisions, all day. Most...

Wherever you are right now, take a look around. Whether you’re at home, at work, in the car, on your bike, or in a restaurant, it’s almost 100% certain you’ll see someone looking at their phone. More than likely, that someone is you! Both of Peter's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch would like you to put your phone down. And get some exercise. Tania Hahn is the owner of a co...

We like to divide things up into opposites. Like married or single. Man or woman. Rural or urban. Increasingly, though, we’re coming to find out that things are not so black and white. Marriage alternatives and pansexuality are subjects for shows that probably don’t wander into the realm of business, but the dichotomy of rural and urban does. Even right down to rural and urba...

"Your new Car and New Job" might at one time have been the subject line of a targeted marketing email. We have left those days behind. Way behind. Today, if you spend any time online – and specially on social media – you’ve no doubt noticed what’s going on with personalized advertisements. Ads seem to be getting increasingly specific. Targeted. And timely. At one time...

After Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans in 2005, we were all focused on the same thing: rebuilding the city. Apart from large areas of the Lower 9th Ward which still remain uninhabited, we have succeeded beyond, what were then, most people’s wildest dreams. Beyond simply rebuilding the city that was, we have moved into what has become the continuing evolution of New Orleans...

The industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is sometimes referred to around here as "Cancer Alley." The name comes from the refineries and chemical plants that dump waste into the air, land and water. If Oleander Medical Technologies succeeds in its plan, “Cancer Alley” is going to have a whole new meaning. On this edition of Out to Lunch, Peter Ricchiuti is lookin...

Human beings have probably been talking about their health since language was invented. Today, the reality of 21st Century healthcare compels us to deal with everything from the cost of an ambulance ride to the fallout of over-prescribed painkillers.  Let's start with the latter. Locally, in Louisiana there are reportedly more prescriptions for opioids than there are citizens of the stat...

Even if you know nothing about business – if your only link to business is listening to this show – you’ve probably heard about the distinction between working in your business and working on your business. Working in your business is what you have to do to get it up and running. Working on your business is what you have to do to keep it running -- and specially to grow it. How y...

You might wonder what a property developer with billion dollar buildings & a boutique bakery have in common. The answer is, personality. Let me explain. I want to start out by telling you about an interesting observation I made recently at the dry cleaner. I happened to be standing at the counter when a guy wheeled a big rack of freshly cleaned men’s dress shirts out of the back. Al...

Sure, you're familiar with renting a car on line. How about wedding flowers? That might sound crazy but it wasn't all that long ago that renting a car online was a novel idea too. Think about the last time you booked a plane ticket on an online travel website.  After you booked the ticket, the website asked you if you’d like to book anything else connected with your trip. A rental car....

You may have heard the expression, "The camera doesn't lie." Meaning, if you're looking at a photo of something, well, that's how it is. Maybe that's how it was back in the day. But these days, there's Photoshop. And every single person with a phone and a social media account has a range of filters and other on-board options that can augment reality to such an extent that your half-eaten hamburger...

When we talk about the creative community in New Orleans we're usually referring to musicians. But there are other creative communities in the Crescent City, including New Orleans fashion, models, actors, and a range of professions on the other side of the cameras. People in the local model and photography communities have typically had to find work for themselves. That is until Elizabeth Perrin s...

In New Orleans we have an abundance of music, food, and festivals. It might not be quite so obvious, but we also have way above the national average of trains, boats, and trucks. Oh, and of course, potholes. If you drive around New Orleans, there are a number of things that can tick you off. Aside from the potholes. One is getting stuck at a railroad crossing. You have your schedule all plann...

If you live in New Orleans, you know one thing for sure: Summer here lasts a long time. It can start getting hot as early as Jazz Fest and some years it’s still hot at Thanksgiving. Because of the long Summer, we’ve gotten pretty good at dressing for the weather here. Did you know New Orleans is the home of the seersucker suit? Seersucker was originally a lightweight fab...

Apparently, we all used to be a lot more fatalistic. We smoked cigarettes and thought it was cool, and we raised a few generations on Ding Dongs, Coca Cola, and fast food before we realized what smoke, sugar, and carbs was doing to our bodies. Thankfully, today we are living in an era where we know about “preventive care.” We take for granted that by taking care of ourselves...

It used to be that, for the most part, politicians led the way for social change. Business people worked within the boundaries of society to make money. Today, things are different. Some of our most innovative agents of change are entrepreneurs. Jeff Bezos. Steve Jobs. Elon Musk. Here in New Orleans we have entrepreneurs who are not household names. Yet. Nick Pashos has a company called Bio Aesthe...

There's a big difference between living in New Orleans, and being a tourist in New Orleans. Tourists do all kinds of fun things that most of us who live here don't. They go on swamp tours. On ghost tours. They drink hurricanes and hand grenades. They wear beads when it's not Mardi Gras. And when they're wandering around the French Quarter with a Big Ass Beer, do you know that a huge number of them...

Who doesn't like cake? Or pie. Or brunch. Or dip. It's one thing to enjoy eating all of these items. It's a whole other thing to make them. Every day. Chaya Conrad and her staff of up to 16 employees open the doors every morning at 7 am at Bywater Bakery and every single day there's a full range of breakfast, lunch, and fresh cakes ready to be enjoyed. Robert Wolf makes 4 different flavors of all-...

If you grow up in New Orleans, you don't realize till some point later in life that the rest of the country doesn't live like you do. Sure, other places have smooth streets, and you can make a left at the lights without having to go another half-block and make a U-turn, but they don't have the music we do. They don't have the food we do. And another thing most people in America don't have, is a pa...

If you're on social media for any amount of time, you frequently stumble across a meme reminding you, you should stop and smell the roses. Most of us would agree with that advice. But we're too busy to do anything about it. If you really did take the time to stop and appreciate everything around you, you'd be aware of lot of things that you take for granted. For example, how often do you stand in...

According to the most recent official figures, around 18 million tourists now visit New Orleans every year. And they spend nearly nine billion dollars while they're here. Financial pundits keep telling us here in New Orleans that we need to diversify our economy, but nobody is telling that tourists and more and more of them keep on coming. This, in turn, employs more and more New Orleanians. But c...

If you're a person of a certain age, you can amuse children by telling them stories of what it was like growing up in the pre-helicopter-parent era. Nobody took you anywhere in an SUV. If you had to go to soccer practice, you found your own way there. And during lunch and recess at school you could climb around on the jungle gym which was a set of steel bars set into concrete. If you fell off of t...