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Out To Lunch
Thursdays at 1pm; Sundays at 5pm

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.

Find episodes of Out to Lunch here.

  • Technology has opened doors in so many industries and enabled us to do so many things we couldn’t even imagine in the past. At the same time, we’ve made things more complicated for ourselves, creating systems that don’t always talk to each other and languages we don’t understand. On this edition of Out to Lunch, two lunch guests who are helping break through the clutter, with products and services that are enabling our tech systems to work for us more effectively - and helping businesses better communicate their messaging. John Morello, is Chief Technology Officer of Gutsy, a tech firm that has come up with a better way to help companies protect themselves against cyberthreat. More specifically, Gutsy uses process mining – and we’ll get into that in a minute – to ensure that the various cybersecurity systems a complex organization has in place are talking to one another and doing what they’re supposed to be doing. If John’s name is familiar to you, it may be because he was a guest on Out to Lunch in 2019, when he was running Twistlock, a tech firm that developed cloud-based cybersecurity solutions. In the years since then, John and his partners in Twistlock have grown that company, attracted new investors, and created the spinoff, Gutsy, to address a need they identified running Twistolock. John is a 14-year veteran of Microsoft, who lives in Baton Rouge and is also a master diver and very active in coastal conservation. Kenny Nguyencis founder and CEO of Three Sixty Eight, a Baton Rouge-based creative and strategic media agency that focuses on branding, marketing and advertising with a high tech, high energy super creative approach. The company’s origins date back to 2011, when Kenny and his friend were still students at LSU and started Big Fish Presentations, which specialized in public speaking and presentation services. In 2016, it merged with another local firm to form 368. In the years since, it has grown to include clients that include CenturyLink, McGraw-Hill Education, GE and Pepsi. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
  • Healthcare is big business, and it’s only getting bigger. In 2021, healthcare expenditures topped $4B in the U.S. By 2028, that figure is expected to reach $6.2B. Within this growing and rapidly changing sector, nurses play an outsized role. They comprise the largest component of the healthcare workforce, they're the primary providers of hospital patient care and they deliver most of the nation’s longterm care. They’re also helping to lead the charge in new ways of delivering care, creating companies right here in Baton Rouge that are reinventing the way nursing is done. Renita Williams Thomas is a pediatric nurse specialist and the owner and CEO of In Loving Arms Pediatric Day Health Center, an outpatient center for children with medically complex needs such as congenital heart disease, traecheotomy, seizure, and genetic and neurological disorders, among others. The center combines skilled nursing, education and therapy and enables children with chronic conditions to interact with other kids their age who may also be going through similar health challenges. Renita founded the center in 2012 after spending more than two decades in the field with the Southern University School of Nursing - where she earned her bachelors and master’s degrees in nursing - Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, the Louisiana State Department of Health and the Lousiaina School for the Visually Impaired. Blasia Rivet is a Registered nurse and the founder and owner of Decision Critical, a concierge nursing agency that offers in home and mobile private duty nursing services in the Baton Rouge region. Services are tailored to fit patient and caretaker needs and include acute and chronic conditions, elderly care support, post op recovery, and more. Blasia founded Decision Critical in 2014 to fill the need she saw in the community for a higher level of personalized care than one can get beyond the doctor’s office. Blasia is a native of Baton Rouge and a graduate of southeastern Louisiana university school of nursing. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
  • Despite the ease and convenience of online shopping, which enables us to procure almost anything we want from anywhere in the world in short order, there’s still something wonderful about buying clothes, apparel, decorations for the home or, really anything for that matter, from a store that we know and love and a brand we have come to trust. Baton Rouge - which likes to call itself "a big small town" - has several homegrown brands that have been in business for generations. In the years since Katrina we've also welcomed a number of well known retailers from downriver in New Orleans. One of them is Perlis, a family-owned apparel retailer has been a fixture in New Orleans since 1939 that has dressed generations of Uptown gentlemen and, in more recent decades, women, in what the company calls Southern Style. In 2009 the Perlis family opened its first Baton Rouge location on Jefferson Highway. Bobby Berthelot has been the store's manager since 2013. A native of New Orleans, Bobby majored in business and after graduating learned about the ropes of merchandising, retail and made-to-order menswear at the venerable Rubenstein’s on Canal Street in New Orleans then Brook’s Brothers before becoming GM at Perlis in Baton Rouge. Lauren LeBlanc Haydel is the founder and owner of Fleurty Girl, another well known south Louisiana brand that hasn’t been around as long as Perlis but is taking the region by storm. Lauren founded the company in 2009 when she was a single mother of three and decided to risk it all creating t-shirts for women that celebrated New Orleans. Today, there are nine FLeurty Girls, including a location in Baton Rouge that opened in the summer of 2023, and Fleurty Girl ships its south Louisiana-inspired merchandise – including t-shirts, gifts, door hangers, gifts for the home and an amazing array of sparkly Mardi Gras stuff – all over the world. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. Photos by Brian Newton.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
  • I’m sure you’re familiar with the saying, “Beauty is only skin deep.” It’s meant to be a reminder – and a reassurance – that there’s more to a human being than appearance. While that’s true, our appearance is vitally important to us. You only have to spend 5 minutes on social media to reaffirm that’s as true today as it ever has been. Our appearance used to be a kind of genetic lottery. Not so much any more. Today you can get your hair, eyes, nose, lips, breasts, tummy, and butt lifted, sculpted, enhanced, reduced or reshaped to more closely resemble how you’d prefer to look. Signs of aging we euphemistically call “laugh lines” and “crow’s feet” can be smoothed away so your selfie looks as youthful as everybody else’s on Instagram. Without a filter! This kind of physical enhancement used to be the province of Hollywood stars and the wealthy citizens of Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Today we have access to these treatments in Baton Rouge. One of the places you can take this journey here is Ford Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Dr Ann Ford Reilley has been practicing medicine for 30 years and was the first woman in Louisiana to be certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery. Dr Reilley’s daughter, Dr Kate Chiasson, has gone one better than her mom: Dr Chiasson is double board certified, by the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Plastic Surgery. Mother and daughter plastic surgeons are partners at Ford Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. There are others forms of body modification we use to enhance our appearance. One of the most ancient - and currently most popular - is tattooing. We have archaeological evidence of humans with tattoos as far back as 5,000 BC. In the early 20th Century, tattoos came to be associated with outlaws and sailors. Somewhere along the line that changed. Today, tattoos are regarded as pieces of art, acceptable in all walks of life and they show up everywhere - from the bedroom to the boardroom. Daniel Esen has been a tattoo artist since 2008, and he’s been inking skin in Baton Rouge for over a decade at his own shop, Black Torch Tattoo. Back in the 1970’s, a hairdresser turned entrepreneur by the name of Vidal Sassoon marketed his salons and beauty products with the slogan, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” Sassoon was talking about something as impermanent as a haircut. For Ann, Kate, and Daniel, his slogan applies in a far more consequential form. After they leave their shop or your clinic, their patients and clients are changed forever. Tattoos and cosmetic surgery are permanent. What Ann, Kate and Daniel are doing every day requires skill, talent, confidence and courage. They’re working in professions in which there is literally no room for error. This conversation is a fascinating insight into what it’s like having that kind of responsibility. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Newton at itsbatonrouge.la.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
  • Downtown Baton Rouge has come a long way over the past two decades, thanks to a lot of careful planning, tireless advocacy, public and private investment, and a commitment from a lot of small businesses to set up shop in the capital city’s historic center. Stephanie's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch Baton Rouge are are two of those small business owners and have unique insights into what it’s like doing business in the heart of always-evolving downtown Baton Rouge Saskia Spanhoff co-owns Cocha Restaurant on Sixth Street downtown with her husband, Enrique Pinerua. The couple opened the restaurant in 2016 with a focus on locally sourced, sustainable, non GMO foods with a Southern menu that draws on the region’s Spanish, French African, and Caribbean influences. In the years since, it has grown into one of downtown’s most popular gathering spots. Saskia is a native of Baton Rouge and LSU graduate with over 25 years of experience in the restaurant and wine industries. She has worked at restaurants around the country. Scott Hodgin is owner and Managing Partner of TILT, a local firm, also based downtown, that specializes in branding, marketing and packaging design for a variety of local products that may be sitting on the shelf in your pantry, including Camellia Beans, Blue Plate mayonnaise, Faubourg Brewing beer, and Big Easy Kombucha. Scott co-founded the firm in 2005 after spending several years learning the ropes at other firms. It's probably no exaggeration to say that every person in the US over 5 years old knows what Coca Cola is and what Walmart is. Assumedly, having achieved 100% market penetration these companies can now quit advertising. However, we see Walmart and Coca Cola marketing everywhere, from YouTube to highway billboards. Why? Because, as we learn in this conversation, it's one thing to have a popular business like a downtown restaurant but it's a whole other thing to keep the branding as fresh as the food. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.