New Orleans business, explained over lunch.
It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch follows New Orleans business through interviews that start with a local scene and end in practical economics. The show is strongest when it connects a cocktail bar, a utility board, a software company, or a live-streaming app to the choices behind how things actually run.
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It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch is a business interview show with a distinctly local frame. It treats New Orleans less like a market and more like a working organism. Restaurants, utilities, software firms, art platforms, divorce services, venture funds, and live-streaming tools all become ways to ask the same practical question: how does this thing actually work? The show usually begins with a broad setup. A street changes after a hurricane. Search behavior shifts as AI replaces familiar Google habits. A diner sees a finished meal, while the real business depends on staffing, benefits, supply orders, customer volume, and social media. Then the conversation narrows into the guest's decisions. That structure gives the show room to be explanatory without sounding like a lecture. It likes hard numbers, but not for decoration. Percentages about divorce, market share for public utilities, remote teams spread across states and countries, and the size of a venture fund all point back to lived business problems. The tone is warm, dry, and practical. It can admire a good idea while still asking what the model looks like, who pays, what changed, and what happens next. Recent episodes range widely: Ferrette Street hospitality, AI search, divorce coaching, the unseen systems behind restaurants, the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, Boot64 Ventures, Jewel of the South, local art access, remote management, Who's Live, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. That range is the point. The show is not only about founders chasing scale. It is about the businesses and institutions that shape daily life in a city with unusual economics, dense history, and a strong sense of place. For listeners tired of abstract business commentary, it offers grounded conversations with real operators. For listeners who know New Orleans, it makes familiar places feel newly legible.
Made for: For listeners who like business stories grounded in place, operations, money, and civic texture. It especially suits people curious about New Orleans restaurants, startups, public institutions, and local entrepreneurs.
What sets it apart: The show connects business mechanics to New Orleans street-level reality. It can move from caviar prices to public utilities to AI search without losing sight of who is making decisions and why they matter.
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.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · August 2026
A New Orleans business show that makes local entrepreneurship, funding, operations, and civic context feel specific and economically legible.
It's New Orleans: Out to Lunch treats Business & Finance as something happening in rooms, budgets, payrolls, storefronts, and civic institutions, not as a clean set of market ideas. Recorded at Columns on St.
A lunch table where New Orleans business guests have to make the numbers make sense.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A New Orleans venture fund lunch that turns roles and rules into plain talk.
Peter Rusciutti guides a lunch conversation with John Roberts of Boot64 Ventures and John Stubbs of Jewel of the South around a deceptively simple question: how does a venture capital firm built from privately raised capital and money from the State Small Business Credit…
A New Orleans business check-in where hospitality, art, and remote work stay tightly linked.
Out to Lunch returns to an early guest and uses the reunion to frame a New Orleans business with a clear local center of gravity. Kenneth Purcell describes a company that blends hospitality, art, and technology: art installed inside the hotel, QR codes that connect people to…
A Black-focused health app frames everyday choices as a design challenge, while a university faces questions about how clearly its identity is understood.
Healthcare usually gets framed around providers, systems, and access points. This episode turns the business lens toward the person receiving care, following Kwame Tera, founder and CEO of Bayer Health Systems, as he describes an app built for Black Americans and designed to put…
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.
Naval Ravikant on epistemology, startups, and crypto, from David Deutsch to Vitalik Buterin.
Alex Theuma interviews SaaS founders and investors on scaling to $10M-plus ARR.
Guy Raz traces founders' origin stories and fields live advice-line calls from entrepreneurs.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Economist Peter Ricchiuti hosts Reid Wick from the Recording Academy and Ethan Elstead from MACNO to explore why New Orleans musicians struggle financially despite the city's musical fame.
Andrew Ward hosts Out to Lunch, interviewing two New Orleans entrepreneurs: Richard Perk, CEO of Divorce Plus, and Ryan North, president of Daycare.com.
This episode explores the story of Klaus Sadlier, a New Orleans inventor from Old Metairie who created the insulated paper coffee cup and sold the design for $170 million.
Out to Lunch examines how Marcy Schramm's Gulf States Newsroom and Todd Smith's WWL-TV are adapting local journalism after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was defunded in 2025.
This episode explores the rapid changes in urban development and business in New Orleans, focusing on the evolution of main streets like Ferrette Street and the success of high-end restaurants such as Cure.
This episode explores how AI is disrupting traditional SEO and internet search, featuring Brian Hong discussing his adaptation from website optimization to AI-driven business strategies.
This episode explores divorce rates, the challenges of navigating divorce, and introduces Divorce Plus, a coaching service that offers mental strategies and support for a healthier divorce process.
This episode explores how the concept of the 'unseen world' applies to the restaurant industry, examining the hidden complexities behind a diner's experience.
This episode explores the unique structure and challenges of the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans, a hybrid public utility with 100% market share, as discussed with business experts.
John Roberts starts backward.
Peter Rashidi checks back in with Kenneth Purcell, one of the show’s early guests.
Peter Rashidi interviews Daniel Hammer of the Historic New Orleans Collection and Nate Verhoeven, founder of Who's Live, about preserving history and aggregating live digital events.
The episode opens by asking who gets counted as a healthcare provider.
This episode discusses the U.S.
This episode features an interview with Bruce Spicer, a New Orleans lawyer and accountant who is a world-renowned Beatles expert and author of 16 books about the band.
The host explores whether personal style is subjective or if there are objective standards in fashion, discussing this with fashion expert Tracy Dundas.
This episode explores how the concept of 'IRL' (in real life) applies to military training, focusing on Kyle Monty's invention of an electromagnetic recoil system for simulated weapons through his company Haptek.