It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

About It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

OUT TO LUNCH Business over lunch. Each week Christiaan invites guests from Acadiana's business community to join him for sushi at Tsunami in downtown Lafayette. Beyond the foundations of the Acadiana economy - oil, cuisine, music - there is a vast network of entrepreneurs, small businesses, and even some of the country's largest companies who call Acadiana home. Out to Lunch is the cafeteria of the wider Acadiana business community. You can also hear the show on KRVS 88.7FM.

Publisher

ItsAcadiana.com

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Jul 2015

Latest episode

17 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

391 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Oct 2026

   Comics and Collectibles

   If you’d made a list, ten years ago, of the brick-and-mortar businesses least likely to survive the internet, the comic book shop likely would have been on it — if for no other reason than every kind of mass market retail has suffered in that age. And yet. Comic shops in North America rang up close to a billion dollars in sales in 2025. That’s up nearly thirty percent in a year, and the first time in fifteen years that comic shops grew faster than bookstores did. The industry as a whole set a record. So what happened? Part of it is Batman. Part of it is Pokémon cards. But a big part of it is something the internet still can’t sell you — an IRL community. Case in point: when Lafayette’s oldest comic shop went up for sale. Some long time customers stepped in to buy it. Kristina and Chris Strong are co-owners of Stronghold Collectibles on Johnston Street (https://strongholdcollectibles.com/). Chris grew up in New Iberia collecting comics with his two younger brothers. Kristina, who’s from St. Louis, married into the habit. The family had been shopping at what was then called Acadiana Comics since the late nineties. When the shop’s owner decided to retire in 2023, after nearly four decades in the business, she sold it to them. The Strongs folded in the online comics operation Chris’s brother Jason had started during COVID, renamed it Stronghold, and nearly doubled the floor space. Today the shop carries more than twenty thousand comics and takes in up to two thousand new ones each week. The ownership group is three Strong brothers, their wives, and a longtime family friend, which makes Stronghold majority woman-owned. In the comic shop world, that’s rare. What’s not rare is the bustling community around the store. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Gravy (https://www.gravylafayette.com/) in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Liliana Morgan (https://www.instagram.com/l.lili.l/) at itsacadiana.com. See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

2. 

   10 Oct 2026

   I Feel Good

   Some days, you just don't feel like yourself. Maybe your back is hurting. Maybe you’re not having a good hair day. Either way, you want help feeling like yourself again. Pain is common. According to a 2019 CDC survey, about four in 10 adults have back pain. Michelle Carr learned this from the patient's side of the table. She grew up in Crowley and came to Lafayette for UL, where she worked at Red's as a personal trainer. Michelle was also a single mother with severe back pain. Her doctors offered medication. Then, in 1992, she tried a chiropractor. She got off the medication and started thinking about doing this for a living. UL didn't have a pre-chiropractic track, so in 2000 she moved to Houston for chiropractic school. She came home in 2004, spent four years learning the business under other chiropractors, and opened Carr Chiropractic Clinic (https://www.carrchiropractic.com/) in 2008. Back then, she counted about 15 chiropractors in the region. And only one of them was a woman. Today she figures there's closer to 100 chiropractors in Acadiana. Carr Chiropractic Clinic sees 20 to 25 patients a day. Some are the grandchildren of her first patients. They tell her coming in feels like coming home. There are a lot of reasons to want a new head of hair. Cancer treatment. Alopecia. Thinning that showed up after COVID. Or you just like how you look in a wig, and you buy a new one every few months. Rebecca Comeaux has fitted all of them, ages 6 to 95. Rebecca grew up on a dairy farm near Carencro. Her mother made the family's clothes and taught Rebecca to cut hair. By eighth grade, Rebecca was cutting her mom's hair with cardboard and rolling her perms. She went from Carencro High straight to Mr. Joseph's Cosmetology School and built a career in hair color, good enough to teach it in New York. Show her a picture, she says, and she'll match it. About 35 years ago, she opened her own salon. Her daughter runs it now as Bella Sophia Salon (https://www.facebook.com/BellaSophiaSalon/) on Heymann Boulevard. Rebecca works out of a private room in the back (https://www.facebook.com/RebeccasWigs/). She stopped doing hair 26 years ago. Now she does wigs. She'll tell you the best part is watching a 6-year-old see herself in the mirror and pop out of the chair like Cinderella. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Gravy (https://www.gravylafayette.com/) in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Alisha Zachery (https://www.facebook.com/alisha.zachery) at itsacadiana.com (https://pod.fo/e/6a5176). See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

3. 

   3 Oct 2026

   Pathways To Peace

   Some places you can't get to with a map. You need a guide. Someone who's been down the road before, who knows where it gets rough, and who'll walk it with you. Sara Sullivan learned her route the hard way. Sara grew up in Ohio in a musical family and picked up the violin at age five. Some of her first gigs were playing hymns with her family at senior homes. She trained classically through college, went into social work, and came to Acadiana in 2009 for what was supposed to be a nine-month stay. Instead, she earned a counseling degree at UL and has been in practice at Hope, Heal and Joy Counseling since 2015. Then, in 2017, at age 44, Sara had a stroke. Recovery meant accepting that she couldn't keep pushing her body the way she had been. She started practicing yoga and going to sound baths — sessions where you lie back and let the sound of bowls, gongs and chimes wash over you — and says it changed her. She wanted her clients to have that too. So she and a fellow musician started hosting sound baths in the lobby of her counseling office, moving the furniture out every weekend to make room. The science on sound and wellness is young. In one study, people reported less tension, anger and fatigue after an hour of singing bowls. Finnish researchers found that stroke patients who listened to music every day recovered memory and attention faster than those who didn't. Sara’s idea has grown into Paths to Restoration (https://www.pathstorestoration.com/), a somatic wellness space behind Asbury Methodist Church in Lafayette. Sara will tell you it is not a yoga studio. The centerpiece is the Forest Room, hung with wisteria and leaves under a fiber-optic night sky. On Saturday mornings, Sara plays violin and Ryan plays handpan, improvising the whole thing. Seven in 10 American households have a pet. That's about 94 million homes. And in one national survey, nearly half of pet owners said they've had to have an animal put to sleep. It's a trip every pet owner knows is coming, and nobody wants to take. When the day arrives, most of us load up the car and drive to the vet's office. Dr. Carolyn Benedetto thinks there's a gentler route. She comes to you. Carolyn grew up in Crowley, in a house where animals were always around and she was the one taking care of whatever showed up. She graduated from veterinary school in 2018 and worked her way through nearly every corner of the field: general practice, emergency medicine, rehab, acupuncture and in-home hospice. Then her own dog developed lymphoma. Carolyn arranged for an at-home euthanasia and came away convinced that a pet's last moments ought to be spent somewhere familiar. She moved back to Louisiana in 2025 and began seeing clients as Forever Family Veterinary Hospice (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61594001680641), a Lafayette-based practice offering in-home euthanasia and end-of-life care for pets. There's no car ride. No waiting room. No exam table. Carolyn doesn't even wear scrubs. To the pet, she's just a friend coming over, and the family gets the time and privacy to say goodbye. Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Gravy (https://www.gravylafayette.com/) in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan (https://www.astormorgan.com) at itsacadiana.com (https://pod.fo/e/6825c7). See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

Who has been a guest on It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Anna Kojevnikov
• Coty Bergeaux
• Seth Dahlen
• Rinea Blanchard
• Trey Boone

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

11,958

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

Spotify

4.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 65 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

71

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

75