There’s a question that gets tossed around in the local music business. “What is New Orleans music?” Is it only music that has a distinct New Orleans vibe, like Professor Longhair or Dumpstaphunk? Or is a singer/songwriter like Andrew Duhon or a Latin band like The Iguanas making New Orleans music because they’re New Orleanians?

The real-world conclusion seems to be – something about New Orleans inevitably seeps into all music that’s made here. And it’s the same with business. My two lunch guests on today's Out to Lunch both started businesses unrelated to New Orleans. But there’s still something inescapably New Orleanian about them.

Ashwin Vilkhu is the chef and owner of The Kingsway, his debut solo restaurant that opened Uptown on Magazine Street in 2025. The Kingsway is a fine-dining restaurant featuring contemporary Asian cuisine, influenced by Ashwin’s family history, their Indian restaurant, and The Kingsway’s focus on fresh, local ingredients.

Shay Claiborne is Founder and CEO of a company and product called Milestone Mate, an app for both parents and professionals that tracks the developmental progress of children aged zero to five. It allows parents to see if their child’s developmental progress is within expected parameters, and offers guidance when it’s not.

For professionals, the app provides referral tracking and documentation, secure communication with families, and a dashboard for monitoring child progress across their practice caseload.

Shay is a child development professional and a mother, which is kind of the same thing but not quite.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for longer than 12 months, there’s a good chance someone has asked you if you’re going to the track for Thanksgiving.

If you’ve never heard that question, well, “The Track” is the Fair Grounds racetrack in Mid City. They’ve been celebrating opening day of the horse-racing season there on Thanksgiving Day since 1892.

124 years later, in 2019, Ingrid Anderson - a New Orleans makeup artist, designer, and all-around creative person - came up with an alternative event. She called it Human Horse Races. Initially it was for people who appreciate local tradition, but aren’t so keen on how racehorses are treated.

Human Horse Races has all the style and excitement of opening day at The Track, except at the Human Horse Races, races are run by humans - wearing horse heads. At the premiere event, Ingrid expected - if all her friends came - she’d have a maximum of 75 people. 300 people showed up. That was an early indication of how things were going to go.

Today, Human Horse Races attracts thousands of people, some of whom also go to the traditional Thanksgiving race day at the track.

If Ingrid has dreams of turning Human Horse Races into a major mainstream event, or growing it beyond New Orleans, she's sitting across the table from the person she needs to meet: Lisa LaCour.

Lisa is Founder and CEO of The Vault Collective, a business strategy company based in New Orleans. The company draws on Lisa’s experience as a business strategist for companies like AOL, Comcast, Mattel, MGM, and Madison Square Garden.

Here in New Orleans, among others, Lisa has worked with Idea Village, Wristbnd, and The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But, in business, as in other aspects of life, although the straight line from A to B might be the most obvious, it’s not the most fun. And often not the most profitable.

Without mixing too many metaphors, being able to see around the corner and find a way for the destination to become the journey is a particular talent. It’s called “creativity” and when it’s applied to business by talented people like Ingrid and Lisa, it combines and transforms the demanding necessity of financial enrichment into the rewarding enrichment of life itself.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The English language is tricky. Take the word “vision” for example. By one definition, vision is the ability of the eye to see what it’s looking at. The other definition of vision is about imagination: the ability to conjure up a picture of something beyond everyday reality. In other words, vision is either seeing what’s there, or what’s not there.

And then there’s the combination of both: where a person can be looking at the same thing you’re looking at, but they see something different.

Valen Purvis was just 16 years old when he saw a bus for sale. He bought it. For $2,000. But the vision Valen had wasn’t driving himself to school in his own bus. It was a mobile clothes store. He ripped out the bus’s seats, renovated the interior, installed racks and shelving, and launched Transit Street Wear.

Today you can go to Transit’s Instagram account, I Love Transit, find out where the bus is stopping, and go clothes shopping.

Normally when we talk about the non-literal meaning of “vision” we’re talking about picturing something that’s going to happen in the future. Marcus Brown’s visions are different – they’re a combination of the present and the past.

When you walk down Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, or Wall Street in New York, you see a street.If you use an augmented realty app on your phone or other device, and you point it at a QR code, you’ll see what Marcus Brown sees.

Marcus is an artist. In a series of works in a collection called “Slavery Trails” he’s created augmented reality pieces in which enslaved people appear on your device as real people. They’re not frozen in a historical setting like a painting or a photo. They appear to be real 3-D people standing right in front of you. They have the appearance and demeanor of slaves in the 1700’s, but they’re on the same modern street you’re on right now, with pedestrians, cars, and the rest of the current world going on around them.

It’s an incredibly moving and effective commentary - and I should add that it’s only one strand of Marcus’s art works which are in galleries and exhibitions across the country and around the world.

The act of putting two things together that have never been thought of as connected is sometimes called “creativity.”Other times it’s called “genius.” Probably the most impactful example would be the combination of a phone and a camera. Today you can barely imagine they were ever separate devices, but when the first mobile phone was manufactured with a camera, nobody could have foreseen Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and the whole way of life that simple piece of creativity gave rise to.

If we were to meet back here 10 years from now, who knows how many mobile clothes stores there might be, or what the state of augmented reality art will look like. Whether or not Marcus and Valen are ultimately creators of a whole new approach to art and retail and change the world, the fact is they’ve both already made a mark in their respective fields, and that is no small achievement.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.