It’s New Orleans: Out to Lunch

Hosted ByPeter Ricchiuti

Tulane University A.B. Freeman School of Business finance professor Peter Ricchiuti holds court over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. Peter's lunch guests are New Orleans business people, from startups to CEO's, from artists to tech entrepreneurs, musicians to movers-and-shakers. New Orleans is on everybody's list as a great place to party but it's also on many lists of the best place to start a business. Peter's deeply knowledgable and equally levity-laden approach to business conversation neatly makese sense of the Crescent City's contradictions.

Urban Dirt – Out to Lunch – It’s New Orleans

We hear a lot about New Orleans being 300 years old. Right around our 100th birthday there was a giant worldwide shakeup. It came to be known as The Industrial Revolution. As it went along, more and more of us started living in cities that got bigger and bigger. Our connection to the land got more and more distant. Today, there’s a movement to try and rebalance. To connect our urban lives with our rural roots.

Nico Krebill

Here in New Orleans Nico Krebill’s company, Schmelly’s Dirt Farm, takes food and organic waste which it uses to make and sell compost.

Grant Estrade

Grant Estrade’s company, Laughing Buddha Nursery, sells organic house plants. On his organic farm, Grant grows vegetables and raises pigs, and chickens, all of which he’ll deliver to you in a subscription box.

It would take an Armageddon-like catastrophe to turn us all back into farmers, but there is definitely some middle ground between urban and rural that gives us the best of both worlds.

Nico Krebill, Grant Estrade, Peter Ricchiuti

Peter Ricchiuti explores the nexus of oor local urban and rural worlds on this edition of out to Lunch.

Photos at Commander’s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

Realtor Tracey Moore