Skin Deep

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.

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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. 

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Real estate development is one of those high stakes businesses where, most of the time, people with a stomach for taking risks, and a lot of money – or at least access to a lot of money-- put together really ambitious plans for a piece of land, convince others to back them and then build apartments or shopping centers or new office buildings and sell them at a profit, not including the hefty developer’s fees they pay themselves along the way. It’s a rich person’s game and most everyone else is left out. But does it have to be that way?

Will Bradshaw and Daniela Rivero Bryant don’t think so. They’ve found a way to make real estate development not only accessible but beneficial to the communities in which it takes place. Will and Daniela are the co-founders of Reimagine Development Partners, a company that does property development and is reimaginging what that looks like.

Like other developers, Reimagine takes advantage of the Federal Historic Tax Program. But, unlike other developers, Reimagine replaces the lender – normally an institution like a bank - with a crowdfunding model. In this way, members of the local community chip in five to ten thousand dollars and become investors in the kind of property development deal normally reserved for financial institutions or wealthy investors.

So, regular folks get access to the kind of potential profit, and the immediate real-world tax advantages, normally only available to property developers.

Will and Daniela started the firm in 2022. He is a career real estate developer and part time professor at Tulane, where he was a founding member of the university’s sustainable real estate development program. Prior to launching Reimagine, Will founded Green Coast Enterprises, a triple bottom line company, which means it is focused on people, prosperity and the planet.

Daniela is an expert in urban disaster resilience and community development. Prior to launching Reimagine, she spent 15 years supporting the post-Katrina housing recovering in New Orleans and assisting local government in Latin America with resilience and recovery poverty creation.

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.

If you turn on the news any time, any day, you’re bombarded with stories about climate change and natural disasters, political strife and polarization, and the world poverty that is driving unrest and a migrant crisis. Any one of these issues - not to mention the local problems at home - is too great for any of us to solve. And yet, some of us feel so compelled to do something. But what?

Dawn Brown is Water Services Director at Matrix New World Engineering, a New Jersey based engineering firm specifically focused on environmental and climate related challenges, as well as resilience and sustainability projects.

These are terms we hear a lot in Louisiana and, based here in Baton Rouge, Dawn makes sense of what they actually mean for us.

Matrix was founded in 1990 and opened its Baton Rouge office in 2015. Dawn is an environmental professional who focuses on project management and development with a particular focus is waste permitting and landfills.

A native of Baton Rouge, Dawn was a high school biology teacher before switching careers, and while Dawn now deals with environmental issues, Rebecca Gardner is doing her own part to change the world, helping migrants and disadvantaged women around the globe through Hands Producing Hope, a non profit she founded in 2014.

Hands Producing Hope sells ethically sourced products made by migrant women and women from disadvantaged countries through a retail shop on Government Street in Baton Rouge and through its website and satellite locations. The organization partners with communities through artisan training programs, maternal health education, life skills classes, adult literacy education, business mentoring and more. It's an extraordinary operation.

Rebecca is a native of Baton Rouge who founded Hands Producing Hope because of her passion for helping disadvantaged families and her desire to see long-term sustainable change in impoverished communities.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Pavlich at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As Louisiana tries to grow its workforce we hear a lot about the energy industry, healthcare, and the food and hospitality sectors for which the state is so well known. Today we’re visiting with two guests who are creating opportunities in two other areas – tech startups and film acting - helping budding entrepreneurs and aspiring actors create companies and film careers. It might not sound like these pursuits have much in common. You might be surprised.

Stephen Loy is Executive Director of Nexus Louisiana, parent company of the Louisiana Tech Park, which is located in the old Bon Marche shopping center on Florida Boulevard. The tech park was created more than 20 years ago to drive economic development and job creation by providing tech startups with resources to bring their products and services to market faster and more effectively.

Stephen has been executive director of the tech park since 2011 and has been with the organization since 2004, when he was hired as their Director of Communications. Today he oversees day to day operations, develops strategies to attract early stage companies, and manages one of Nexus' signature programs : Tech Park Academy. 

While Nexus Louisiana is growing the entrepreneurial ecosystem, Jency Hogan is helping to grow the local cultural economy through the drama school she and her husband, Aaron Hogan, founded and run. It’s called Love Acting and it’s specifically focuses on teaching film acting, as opposed to stage acting. The Hogans are both professional actors, who founded the school on returning to Jency’s native Baton Rouge after eight years in Los Angeles. Jency has produced short films, co-directed a western epic, was on the producer team of a biopic directed by Ethan Hawke, and is currently a recurring character named Vera Minder on the TNT hit Claws.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Analise Gonzalez  at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than a decade now, we’ve been talking about the changes brought about by e-commerce and how fewer and fewer of us are venturing out to malls and shops and opting instead of the convenience of e-retail platforms.

As this brave new world of online shopping continues to evolve, we’re seeing an ever-growing and fascinating landscape of entrepreneurs who are using pieces and parts of the new technology, mixing the old with the new, the virtual with the real, and coming up with new iterations of retail.

Nathan Pearce is CEO of Pearce Bespoke, a Baton Rouge clothier that is making custom tailoring more accessible, affordable, and easy, by using some of the digital  tools that have made e-commerce so popular to create old-fashion, handmade garments.

Pearce Bespoke offers tailor-made suits and separates through a mobile shop. They come to you, get your measurements, and whip up a designer piece of clothing for you in just a few weeks.

Nathan has been in the clothing business for much of his career. He launched a custom T-shirt making business while fresh out of college and founded Pearce Bespoke in 2021, which now has brick and mortar locations in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette. He is also franchising the brand and has more than 50 locations across the south. 

If you listen to radio shows and podcasts about business, you’ve probably heard entrepreneurs talk about the success of their business, describing almost gleefully how they initially failed before they made it.

Well, failure isn’t always as much fun as these success stories make it sound. Not every failure is followed by success. Sometimes it’s followed by a career change.

Take, for example, Conrad Freeman. Today Conrad runs the fabrication lab in the LSU College of Art and Design. It’s a lab where faculty and students can design and build stuff using a variety of materials.

Before that, in 2020, Conrad founded Freeman Handcrafted designs, which made contemporary furniture by hand for commercial and residential customers. While Conrad’s furniture was beautiful, the market for his high-end products was very small in Baton Rouge and running the business was challenging, which is why he left just two years after founding the company for the position at LSU.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from thois show by Brian Pavlich at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a show about business. Not a place you’d typically turn to for dating advice. But on this edition of Out to Lunch we’re talking about the business of dating, love, and marriage.

For past generations – your parents or grandparents - charting a life course seemed to be a lot simpler. Especially for a woman. You graduated from high school, you got married to your high school sweetheart or a guy you met in college, and everybody lived happily ever after.

Then we hit the 1970’s, and 50% of marriages ended in divorce.

Today in the United States, people are waiting longer to get married. Or opting not to tie the knot at all. Since 1973, marriage rates in the US have declined nearly 60%.

Other statistics tell us that people are finding it harder to make meaningful connections. More young people than ever report feeling alone, disconnected, and clinically depressed.  

And all this comes at a time when a staggering array of apps and online dating sites are promising to pair people up for everything from one-night stands, to casual relationships to forever partnerships.

What’s not working? And how do we fix it?

We could look forward, to the next generation of technology and ask AI to find us love and happiness. Or we could look back. And rather than having to check a box that says, “I’m not a robot,” how about sitting down face to face with an actual human being who is a dating specialist?

Yes, there is such a job. It’s called a Matchmaker. Admittedly there aren’t many of them. Ann Parnes is one of the very few.

Ann Parnes is founder of Match Made in NOLA, a traditional matchmaking service that is, as its name implies, based in New Orleans but has expanded to Baton Rouge and does business like a real old-fashioned matchmaker – by carefully curating potential partners and introducing them to one another.

Ann began her career as an attorney and spent several years prosecuting criminals, until 2014, when she felt a calling taking her in a different direction and became a certified life coach.

From there she began to sense what she says was a real calling and a recognition that she had a gift for bringing people together, so in 2017 she opened Match Made in NOLA. And now her services have expanded to include Baton Rouge.

most people who are dating and looking for a partner are younger. They’ve grown up with Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, OK Cupid, Christian Mingle, J-Date, Match.com and the list goes on. There are even specialty dating apps like “Dig – the dog lovers dating app.”

So, let’s start with the obvious question. Is someone who turns to an old-fashioned matchmaker burned out on dating apps? Or is a typical client someone different who can’t bring themselves to use a dating app and hasn’t had any success meeting anyone at The Chimes or Chelseas?

Could matchmaking be for you? On this special dating love and marriage edition of Out to Lunch, Ann explains the art and science of dating to Stephanie.

If you're looking for a great place for a date in Baton Rouge you can't beat Mansurs on the Boulevard. We've been meeting there every week for years on Out to Lunch and we're all still happily working together! And if you're looking for even more of an insight into Ann's life you can check her out on It's New Orleans Happy Hour.

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Paris. London. Rome. Baton Rouge. Yes, your next piece of stylish designer clothing might come from right here.

South Louisiana is known for food and music and other artistic and creative cultural expressions so perhaps it’s surprising that we’re not known for our clothing designers. With so much inspiration to draw from, meet the crestive forces behind two local clothing lines. 

Dave Duncan is co-owner of Jack Duncan Design, a sustainably made menswear brand that creates shirts for the everyday man. Dave founded and runs the company with his wife Brittany Tubb Duncan, who shares his passion for finding unique prints and has her own brand, Itty by Bitty, which provides children’s options in the Jack Duncan prints.

Dave and Brittany founded Jack Duncan Design in early 2023 and currently operate out of their home study and shop in mid City. 

Paula LaFargue is owner and designer at the Maybe Collection, a Baton Rouge-based business that also uses ethical practices to make comfortable, functional women’s garments that have minimal environmental impact – and they’re also beautiful and affordable.

Paula started the company in 2016 after spending 10 years designing clothes for nursing moms, children and utility workers – not all at the same time. She is a a native of Baton Rouge who attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and cut her teeth in the fashion industry in New Orleans and Chicago before returning home in 2009.

Paula is a returning guest on this show. We last spoke during the pandemic, when we were remote on Zoom. Since then, the Maybe Collection has grown. 

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.

The bulk of Louiaisna's population, living in cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans, probably don’t think much about it, but farming is a significant sector of the state’s economy. Nearly one-third of the state’s land is farmland!

There are 27,400 farms in Louisiana, though it’s a rapidly changing and challenging way to make a living. Even given the obstacles though, there is opportunity for a new generation of creative cultivators who are practicing new ways of raising livestock, growing crops, and creating new products with the output.

Galen Iverstine is founder and co-owner of Iverstine Farms and Butcher. The name of the company refers to a farm in Kentwood, Louisiana that uses sustainable farming practices in raising its cattle, and a full-service butcher shop, smokehouse and "eatery" in Baton Rouge.

At the Baton Rouge outlet Galen sells local, farm-raised meats, and supports local farming partners who prioritize land-healing methods.

Galen started the business in 2010, when he purchased his 65 acre farm. It grew out of his experience senior year at LSU, when, trying to figure out what to do with his life, he took an English class that focused on food writing and in doing so learned all about food policy, industrial agriculture models and subsistence farming. It might be the most unique introduction to farming, ever!

Nathalie Noel's connection to Louisiana agriculture is through our sugracane crops. Nathalie is CEO of Noel Family Distillery, a company based in Donaldsonville that uses locally sourced sugarcane to distill ultra premium spirits. Not only do they make tequila, rum and vodka, they also blend their spirits with natural flavors to produce a line of ready-to-drink, canned craft cocktails.

Nathalie founded the Noel Family Distillery with her dad, Chip, who was inspired to open a distillery by his travels as a pilot, where he discovered Caribbean style and Central American rums.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Pavlich at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We live at an interesting nexus today, where so much of our economy is focused on building processes and systems that enable us to exist in the virtual world while at the same time we continue to build and develop the physical world in which we also exist. Maybe one day, one of those worlds will overtake the other. For now though, we seem to have one foot in each world and pass between them multiple times every day. Navigating our journeys through both of these worlds creates unlimited opportunities for creative entrepreneurs.

Dustin Puryear os founder and CEO of Giant Rocketship, a Baton Rouge based tech company that has developed an AI-powered project manager that efficiently assigns and monitors tasks for IT companies, and can reassign them if a team member faces challenges or is unavailable.

Dustin founded Giant Rocketship as an outgrowth of Puryear IT, which provides a range of IT services for small and medium-sized business. Dustin still owns both companies, but spends most of his time these days focused on Giant Rocketship.

Dustin has also has a developed a niche as a speaker in IT circles, where he shares insights on technology, cybersecurity and AI. 

Firmly in the real world, Baton Rouge native Nick Miller is founder and CEO of Build Commercial Construction, a full service commercial construction company that works in the multifamily, retail, healthcare and industrial spaces, and also does storm and wetlands remediation - a growing segment in climate-challenged south Louisiana.

Nick graduated from LSU’s Bert S. Turner School of Construction Management and got his start with Manhattan Construction, where he was a project manager overseeing construction of L’Auberge Casino. He later spent several years with a large general contractor until taking the brave step of branching out on his own to form Build Commercial Construction, which specializes in the design assist delivery method of construction which increases the collaborative efforts between owners, designers and the general contractor. Recently the firm expanded its footprint to two nearby states. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Brian Pavlich at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.