Baton Rouge business, explained over lunch.
It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch treats Baton Rouge business as something built by specific people in specific rooms. Recent episodes move from construction and software to beauty, media work, tourism, home decor, and the everyday choices behind small companies.
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It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch is a local business interview show built around the working life of Baton Rouge and nearby Louisiana communities. It is measured, warm, and usually practical. The show spends less time selling a grand business lesson and more time asking how a real company came to exist. That makes the conversations feel useful. Recent episodes trace a broad map of local enterprise: home decor and custom building through The Corbel and a construction company, commercial renovation through NRK Construction, digital identity work at Invoke, classroom software concerns around professor reviews, campground ownership near New Orleans, immersive media from King Crow Studios, sports marketing tied to YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket, beauty-service apps, salon culture, audio engineering, and photography. The range is wide, but the habit is consistent. A guest explains the path, the interviewer slows down the story, and the business becomes easier to picture. Small details matter here. A superintendent on every job site. A salon owner asking customers what they would actually book. A campground shuttle running late so visitors can get back safely. QuickBooks, invoices, drones, contractors, renovations, and client meetings all get room beside larger talk about technology, culture, and growth. Baton Rouge stays central. The show is interested in what can be built from Baton Rouge, from a software firm involved in digital driver's license technology to media work connected to national sports audiences. It also has a clear affection for people who did not begin with a perfect plan. Several stories turn on a pivot: nonprofit fundraising into construction, heavy equipment work into campground management, teaching into app building, teenage music recording into audio engineering. That pattern gives the show its shape. It is not glossy founder mythology. It is a table-level account of how local businesses find customers, solve operational problems, and become part of the place around them. The tone is friendly but not empty. The best episodes make entrepreneurship feel less like a slogan and more like a series of choices made by people with leases, payroll, tools, clients, and a reason to stay in Baton Rouge.
Made for: For listeners who like local business stories, founder paths, and practical conversations about how companies actually operate. It especially suits people curious about Baton Rouge entrepreneurship beyond the usual startup headlines.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by treating regional business as lived community infrastructure, not abstract advice. Its strength is patient questioning that connects big industries to job sites, salons, studios, apps, campgrounds, and lunch-table details.
OUT TO LUNCH finds Baton Rouge Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel combining her hard news journalist skills and food background: conducting business over lunch. Baton Rouge has long had a storied history of politics being conducted over meals, now the Capital Region has an equivalent culinary home for business: Mansur's. Each week Stephanie holds court over lunch at Mansur's and invites members of the Baton Rouge business community to join her. You can also hear the show on WRKF 89.3FM.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It makes the business infrastructure around musicians, booking platforms and audio work unusually concrete.
A lunch-table business question usually leads It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch toward the machinery behind a creative career. Amy Irvin and Stephanie Riegel press guests for operational detail, moving from the visible product to the software, equipment, bookkeeping and client work…
Boudin balls meet robotic dinosaurs at lunch, so your business curiosity never gets served plain.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Baton Rouge episode links virtual training, football fandom, and ambitious work rooted in Louisiana.
This episode works best as a Baton Rouge story with a wider lens. Cody Louviere, founder and CEO of King Crow Studios, traces a route from Lake Charles video-game ambitions to simulation work for the U.S.
Two Baton Rouge founders discuss beauty services, professional networks and adapting an unusual event space.
This Baton Rouge episode pairs two distinct business stories: a beauty-services app and an event space inside a 1920s mechanics garage. The app founder draws on nearly 10 years as a salon owner to explain why young stylists may struggle to form professional networks.
A clear look at the craft, bookkeeping, and coordination behind a local show's production credits.
Out to Lunch treats its own end credits as a doorway into the work behind a finished local show. J.T. O'Neill explains how recording his own music as a teenager led to becoming the full-time house sound engineer at Spanish Moon, while the photography discussion quietly corrects…
A Baton Rouge business episode where sober disco nights and a robotic dinosaur share a practical showman's spark.
The episode starts with a quick pass through 1970s disco, then settles into the stranger, more practical work of staging nights people remember.
A Baton Rouge music-tech episode on centralizing live-event booking for performers and venues.
Bloom Booking follows Brandon Harris, founder and CEO of the music tech startup Bloom Booking, through a focused look at how the platform aims to bring the live-event booking process into one place for performers and venues.
A grounded, patient look at Louisiana flavor as it moves from local food memory to fryer-ready production.
Live Catfish With Boudin Balls follows a Louisiana food idea from memory to manufacturing, asking how etouffee-style flavors can become a fried product sturdy enough for real production.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Oscar Tickle hosts Yvette Bonanno, founder of Crave-A-Ball, and Darren Pizzolatto of Tony's Seafood on Out to Lunch.
Stephanie Riegel hosts entrepreneurs Brandon Harris and Tenley Gorman to discuss their music-tech startups.
Oscar Tickle interviews Sage Roberts-Foley about Baton Rouge Green's efforts to restore and enhance the city's urban tree canopy and green spaces.
Stephanie Riegel interviews Jennifer Lofton about her Baton Rouge-based hat-making business Chapeau, which creates custom headpieces for events like the Kentucky Derby and hosts hat-making parties.
Host Stephanie Riegel interviews pediatric nurse specialist Renita Williams-Thomas about her business In Loving Arms Pediatric Day Health Center, which provides skilled nursing and therapies for children with complex medical needs.
Oscar Tickle interviews Chris Dykes about his journey from tracking habits on a spreadsheet to co-founding an app-building business and creating the EverBetter app.
Amy Irvin hosts Catherine Wilkes, a nurse of 20 years with about 30 self-published books, and Margaret Wilkinson, co-owner of Rad Dad Alternative Wellness.
Amy Irvin introduces local power couple Dawn and Susan Charlay, co-owners of The Corbel, discussing their entrepreneurial journey from construction to home decor.
Amy Irvin interviews Norisha Kurtz Glover of NRK Construction and Rafe Whalen of Benzite about entering industries where they were unexpected participants.
Amy Irvin interviews Calvin Fabry, founder of Invoke, about building Louisiana's digital driver's license and his work on global digital identity standards.
Professor Nash Mahmoud discusses the flaws in Rate My Professor and his efforts to create a better system for student reviews.
Amy Irvin interviews campground owner Mike Dunn about his unexpected career and how small decisions shape a city's character.
Amy Irvin frames this Out to Lunch episode around two Baton Rouge-based careers that reach far beyond Louisiana: Cody Louviere at King Crow Studios and Danielle Brown at YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket.
Amy Irvin opens with wartime labor history, saying women rose from about 12 million workers in 1940 to over 18 million by 1945, then connects that arc to today’s nearly 45% female share of U.S.
JT O'Neill defines audio engineering as running microphones, setting levels, and blending sound, while Miranda Alvarez and Ian Lito describe Albaleta Media's path from LSU student work to 40-plus projects.
Out to Lunch pairs Alisa Lundy of Five to Nine Dance Club with Martin Wilmot of the Dinosaur Experience, and both businesses are framed as responses to stress, isolation, and play.
Oscar Tickle interviews Yvette Bonanno about her company Crave-A-Ball, which turns classic Louisiana dishes into deep-fried, handheld balls.