It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

Over the last few years, Southwest Louisiana has boomed. Billions in petrochemical investments poured into the region and put Lake Charles on an economic tear. 

And there were plenty of entrepreneurs to take advantage of the bonanza. With big ticket clientele around and plenty of work, prosperity in Lake Charles market was the envy of the state. 

The pandemic put a halt to that. Just like it did the last decade of economic expansion in America, the longest on record. 

Just when Lake Charles and the rest of Louisiana began to wake up again. It got walloped. Twice. First Hurricane Laura. Then Hurricane Delta. 

Christiaan's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana have businesses  in Lake Charles that have managed to keep chugging despite the chain of disasters. 

John Viator operates a pair of bicycle shops - Southern Bicycle Company in Lake Charles and Acadiana Bicycle Company in Lafayette. The industrial clientele in the Lake Charles area has made the shop there very successful. And John has catered to them. But he’s also diversified. He launched a golf cart operation, Southern Golf Cars, two years ago, is developing a running retail brand and now has eyes on the shoe market.  

Cody Porche’s company, Porche Aerial Imagery, flies unmanned drones for aerial photography in the Lake Charles’ industrial sector. Drones are cheaper and safer to operate than helicopters and have begun to shoulder in on that market. As you can imagine, aerial photography is in pretty high demand after a disaster, and Cody says Laura has kept him very busy since it came ashore with devastating effect across Southwest Louisiana. 

See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. Here's some more lunchtime conversation about Lake Charles from BC (Before Covid).

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It wasn’t that long ago that eating organic was a niche kind of thing. Convenience was king and farm-to-table restaurants were seen as little more than a trend for diners with big wallets. You might find some novelty snacks at a grocery — or if you had a Whole Foods around and the willingness to spend your whole paycheck.

But eating “organic” is really how we ate for most of human civilization. It shouldn’t be that surprising that there’s a demand for something we’ve had in our cultural DNA for centuries. 

Christiaan's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana both operate homegrown food brands that get back to the roots of how we eat, with a mix of innovation. They’re familiar faces at farmers markets, but landed in the trade at very different points in their lives. 

Larry Lemarie spent most of his life in the oil and gas industry. After he retired, he became a hydroponic farmer. At Cajun Acres Farms in Arnaudville he grows tomatoes and lettuce and kale that he sells at farmers markets. The method is clean, naturally bug free and fast. His basil is in high demand and he’s been struggling to keep up with orders. He’s currently designing and building a version of his hydroponic system to bring to Haiti as a part of a nonprofit mission.

Taylor Stokes broke into the organic snack business when she broke her leg. Inspired to find something to munch on that could satisfy her carb cravings without gaining weight, she went vegan and experimented with veggie snacks with Cajun flavor. Out of the lab came Taylormade Eats, a line of kale chips that she launched at local farmer markets. Her chips landed on shelves at Lafayette’s Whole Foods when the organic grocer opened a few years ago. They now stock Taylormade chips at their stores in Houston. 

Find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

Here's some more lunch-table conversation about organic options in Acadiana. 

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Christiaan Mader was unexpectedly out of commission today so we've decided to take a trip back to our Best Of vault and make a return to the life of pies.

When we hear about people who are successful in business, we tend to hear different versions of a familiar story. Somebody with a singular vision relentlessly pursues an idea, till, against all odds and after all kinds of hardship, they create Wal-Mart or Apple. What you hear less often, are stories about people who have no single-minded obsession, but are nonetheless successful and happy, doing something today that just a few short years ago they would never have imagined. That’s the category that both of Aileen’s lunch guests fall into on this episode of Out to Lunch Acadiana. 

Kevin Blanchard started out as a journalist. He was a news reporter in Lafayette, for The Advocate. By 2008 he was married and had kids. For a guy with a family to raise, the future of the newspaper business didn’t look too bright. So, Kevin went back to school. In 2011, he graduated from LSU with a law degree. As an attorney, Kevin was serving as Public Works Director and Chief Development Officer for Lafayette Consolidated Government when he came in contact with the owners of Southern Lifestyle Development. They’re the company behind River Ranch, and 17 other communities they’re developing throughout Louisiana.

Kevin went to work at Southern Lifestyle Development as their in-house counsel. He soon became the company’s Chief Operating Officer. And that’s what he’s doing today, managing 40 employees.

Korey Champagne grew up in Thibodaux, went to LSU and majored in dietetics and nutritional science with a plan of getting into healthcare. On the way to making that plan happen, Korey was working as a paramedic. That’s when he met his wife, who is from Broussard, and they had a child.

At this time, Korey was making some extra money by going to The Farmers Market with homemade pies that he was making. He couldn’t help but notice two things: one, he loved making pies. And two, his pies sold out really  quickly. For a while, Korey was a paramedic piemaker. Till it got to the point where he had to make a decision about where to concentrate his efforts. The sensible plan would have been to concentrate on a career in healthcare.

And that’s how Korey came to be the founder and owner of a growing business called Acadian Slice. Acadian Slice is not a healthcare company, it makes pies.

Today’s business plan lesson? What business plan? Apparently you can follow your heart or your gut, without a plan, and end up being happy and successful.

Photos at Marcello’s Wine Market Cafe by Lucius Fontenot.

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Remember back in the BC (Before Covid) days when we had a music business? In this edition of Out to Lunch we look back on this conversation originally recorded in 2018.

In Acadiana there are a lot of things that differentiate us from the rest of the country. The biggest of all of them is music.

You can live in Kansas and learn to make a gumbo. You can live in California and row a pirogue. But there’s no way in the wide world that you can convincingly play Jolie Blond on the accordion or Bosco Stomp on the fiddle, unless you’re born and raised here.

Typically, in a Western capitalist economy, a rare resource is worth a lot of money. However, when it comes to our treasured musicians, we tend to under value them. Most Cajun and Zydeco musicians are working a second job to subsidize their music career.

Wilson Savoy plays in the Grammy Award winning band Courtbouillon, and crowd favorite Pineleaf Boys. He’s also a carpenter, building and renovating homes.

Danny Devillier is a musician. And he’s come up with a new angle on a traditional way musicians often subsidize their careers: giving music lessons. Danny is a drummer. He plays in the Grammy nominated band Bonsoir Catin, and he’s played with everybody who’s anybody in Cajun and Zydeco from Michael Doucet to Roddie Romero. But Danny doesn’t just give drum lessons. He teaches people to play all kinds of instruments, including guitar and fiddle, at his music school, The Music Room, in Lafayette.

Photos over lunch at Cafe Vermilionville  by Lucius A Fontenot are at our website.

Hear Wilson's mom, Ann Savoy on Out to Lunch, and brother Joel too.

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When you have a business, you usually have some sort of a business plan. Even if you don’t run endless spreadsheets, you have goals, and an idea of how things will look if everything goes right. And, though you might be a bit more reluctant to think about it, you generally have an idea of what things might look like if you hit a lean period.

But, no matter how carefully you plan for every eventuality, for our two guests on Out to Lunch today there was nothing in the playbook to turn to when events conspired against them in the first Quarter of 2020.

When we first talked to them about appearing on Out to Lunch, we had a very different show planned. For April 2020. They both had very different shows planned for April 2020 too.

Scott Feehan is Executive Director of Festival International. If you live in Acadiana, you’re already wincing in sympathy. And wondering, “What’s going to happen to Festival in 2021?”

If you don’t know anything about Festival International, it’s a gigantic, sprawling and fabulous, free, street festival that takes in downtown Lafayette every year in April. It’s the biggest international music and arts festival in the U.S.

The Other Show

Are you wondering what could be equally as difficult as being responsible for staging an outdoor street festival during a global pandemic? How about running a theater company? That’s what Steven Landry does.

Steven is Managing Artistic Director of Acadiana Repertory Theater.

Acadiana Repertory Theater, or ART, is one a of a rare breed of theater companies that specializes in premiering new plays. If you’re one of the 73,000 playwrights on planet earth, it’s tough getting your work performed on any stage, anywhere. That’s why ART gets to select their annual season of 3 or 4 shows from over 1,400 submissions.

You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. Check out Scott's appearance on Out to Lunch in happier days for Festival, and all of us. But, hey good times are around the corner and the show must go on!

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If you’re talking to somebody and you’re discussing how far it is from here to your place, you might say “It’s a long way.” The person you’re talking to can say, “How far is it exactly?” You can tell ‘em, “Three miles,” and they can decide if they regard that as a long way or not.

Here in Acadiana, it’s equally important to have an accurate measure of heat. But when somebody says to you, “How hot is that gumbo?” what do you say? You’re left with reverting to a use of language that is more Asian than English - where the meaning of a word changes with the intonation.

In discussing gumbo, “It’s hot” has a vastly different meaning than “It’s hot.” But, although we might understand each other, you can’t communicate with anywhere near the objective accuracy you had when you were discussing how far it is from here to your place. Which is curious, because there is actually a scientific measure of spiciness. Heat, in this sense, is measured in Scovilles.

A standard bottle of Tabasco sauce is around 5,000 Scovilles. Keep that number in mind. 5,000. Because there’s a guy here in Lafayette who grows his own peppers, and he’s famous in the world of pepper-growers for breeding and growing one of the world’s hottest peppers. It’s called the Primo Pepper. The Primo Pepper is 1.5 million Scovilles. That’s hot.

The Primo Pepper is the creation of Troy Primeaux, but everybody calls him Primo.

If you want to try Pimo’s Peppers but you don’t want to risk blowing the top of your head off, you can try sensibly tempered versions of the Primo taste in various forms – in hot sauces and in The Farmer’s Daughter brand of pepper jellies. You can find these products in a number of stores across the Sate of Louisiana, and you can also find them online at the amazon.com of Cajun food, a website called CajunCrate.com.

If CajunCrate.com doesn't have every single product with the word “Cajun” in the title, and every single food product made in Acadiana, it’s got to be close. They have everything from Nunu’s Original Cajun Seasoning to Bayhi Cajun Chili Starter, Zydeco Chop Chop, and thousands of other items. You can also get a box of assorted Cajun goodies sent to you each month in an actual Cajun Crate, if you’re a Cajun Crate subscriber.

Cajun Crate has been a successful business from its earliest days in 2016. Its creator and owner is Tara Guidry.

Photos from this show by Jill Lafleur are at our website.

And there's more conversation about Cajun Crate and hot peppers.

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Louisiana shares the abbreviation “L.A” with the city of Los Angeles. Although that sometimes leads to some confusion on paper and online, in the real world there is very little overlap between the LA lifestyle in the desert west and the LA lifestyle in the humid South.

For example, if I was to say “burritos” you’d say Los Angeles. If I was to say “poboys” you’d pick Louisiana.

So, how about “skateboarding?” Naturally you’re going to say, Los Angeles. But you know this is a trick question, right?

The answer is, Lafayette native, Daniel Barousse. Daniel is an artist. A woodworker. And a skateboarder. The combination of those three traits is a company called Barousse Works, in which Daniel makes works of art from recycled skateboards.

How's The Market Doing?

No, not the stock market. The other one. On South Johnston.

During the Covid crisis we’ve seen some changes around here. Some businesses we regraded as institutions, and others we always assumed were doing great, have closed for good.

Although we all lose something when a local business closes, as consumers we manage to recover. We find another place to eat a poboy, drink a daiquiri, or buy whatever it was we used to get at what used to be our favorite place.

But, during this pandemic we have come to realize there are some institutions that are simply irreplaceable. One of them is officially known as the Lafayette Farmers and Artisans Market, in Moncus Park. If you’re from Lafayette, you know it as The Farmer’s Market at The Horse Farm. Every Saturday morning since June 2013, the Farmer’s Market has been selling everything from fresh produce to popcorn. And offering experiences from Cajun music to face painting, 52 weeks a year. Some Saturdays it’s bitterly cold. Some Saturdays it’s raining. But every Saturday the Farmer’s market is open.

Or, it was. Until it wasn’t.

To catch up with what we’re optimistically calling post-covid plans for the Farmer’s Market, Alieen Bennett talks with Market Director, Mark Hernandez.

If you didn’t know this show was made in the Louisiana variant of LA, and you just heard us talking about a vibrant farmer’s market and an artist who makes pieces of sculptural functionality out of recycled skateboards, you might well assume we were talking about the second largest city in America, rather than the 4th largest city in Louisiana.

See photos from this conversation by Jill Lafleur at our website.

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As Out to Lunch prepares to go back to hosting live lunches, for inspiration we're taking a look at some of our pre-Covid shows. Here's an Out to Lunch Best of: Biographies and Boxing.

History is a messy business. It’s full of mixed and conflicting perspectives. It’s subject to revision — for the right or wrong reasons  And while it’s tempting to think of it as a collection of facts, history is really a collection of perspectives. 

This holds especially true for histories of people. Think about it: there are competing biographies, or authorized biographies, even unauthorized biographies - and, of course,  autobiographies. 

Christiaan's guests on this episode of Out to Lunch Acadiana are both writers of history. 

Jason Theriot is a freelance author, a New Iberia native, and an academic. He’s written on a number of subjects, not just about people, including World War II histories and works about the environment, particularly the Gulf Coast. Jason is a former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School where he worked on Environmental Policy. He’s currently working on a history of tank barges. 

Deirdre Gogarty Morrison wrote her own history. She published an autobiography about her career as a boxer called “My Call to the Ring.”

Deirdre was born and raised in Ireland and moved to Lafayette to work with the legendary boxing coach Beau Williford. Irish law prohibited women from boxing professionally but that didn't deter Deirdre. She was to become Ireland’s first women’s world champion and has been inducted into the international women’s boxing hall of fame.

Deidre is retired from professional bouts now and spends her boxing time coaching both men and women. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Chopsticks restaurant in Lafayette.

You can find photos from this show by Lucius Fontenot, and more, at our website. 

Find out more about extraordinary Acadiana women in sports here.

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As Out to Lunch prepares to go back to hosting live lunches, for inspiration we're taking a look at some of our pre-Covid shows. Here's an Out to Lunch Best of: Louisiana Silicon Bayou.

The term "Silicon Bayou" has been around for some time. It’s the promise of a new economy for Louisiana, sometimes thought of in New Orleans. Beyond the confines of the Crescent City, the Louisiana Silicon Bayou stretches well into Acadiana.

When you think about it, this area has always been the frontier when it comes to business, and that attitude was put on the map by oil speculators who came to be known as "wildcatters."

Today we call that, "entrepreneur." These are the risk takers. The folks hunting for the next big idea and hoping to strike gold. 

Christiaan's lunch companions on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana both work in the world of startups — the new business frontier with a different kind of wildcat. 

Kyle Boudreaux, more often called Skip, got into the startup world early. By 25 he was the CEO of an innovative diaper company. He went on to work in the world of investment capital and he recently launched the first venture capital firm in the area, called Acadian Ventures. 

Bill Dalton has worked in digital marketing since the dot-boom. He launched Firefly Digital in the late 90s with his partner Mike Spears. The company was one of the first ad agencies in the area to build and design marketing campaigns for the web. People still called it the world wide web back then. Firefly Digital incubated the startup Smart Choice Technologies to a successful exit. Now re-branded as Firefly Marketing, Bill’s team provides full-service digital marketing for clients near and far. 

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded over lunch at The French Press in Lafayette. There are photos from this show by Gwen Aucoin and lots more info on our website https://link.chtbl.com/Vj_kXlwb

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As Out to Lunch prepares to go back to hosting live lunches, for inspiration we're taking a look at some of our pre-Covid shows. Here's an Out to Lunch Best of: Boudoir Photography.

Maybe you think Boudoir Photography - intimate, seductive portraits taken for romance or personal empowerment - is something that happens in other places. After all, we're pretty conservative around here. Aren't we? Well, apparently not. 

April Courville got a masters in marketing in college and wound up in Minnesota where she fell into boudoir photography. When April moved back to Lafayette she  built a big enough book of business to strike out on her own full time with a boudoir photography business called A. Danette Photography.

Here’s a photography cliche. Why hire a photographer when a phone can do the job? That was already the conventional wisdom 13 years ago when the iPhone debuted. Since then, the lenses have only gotten better and people have started making millions taking pictures of their lives on Instagram. But the professional photographer never went obsolete as predicted. 

That’s because there are plenty of circumstances that require a professional touch — weddings, portraits, magazine features and commercial photography that requires special skills to make the ordinary look extraordinary. That doesn’t mean making a living behind the camera isn’t a hustle. Success in photography takes relentless self-promotion, creativity and maybe a little luck. 

Paul Kieu detoured into photography while on a path toward law school. Taking pictures was a hobby until he figured out he could get paid to do it and he stuck with it after graduating from UL with a degree in political science. He worked as a photojournalist for the Daily Advertiser for several years until leaving to work on his own. Taking a particular interest in culture, Paul’s work captures Acadiana’s boucheries, festivals and celebrations in vivid detail. You can find his photos in several local and regional publications. 

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded over lunch at The French Press in downtown Lafayette. And talking of photographs, if you'd like to see photos from this show by Travis Gauthier you can find them at https://itsacadiana.com/show/out-to-lunch/

More conversation over lunch about Acadiana photography here.

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