VIDALIA — The Mississippi River doesn’t need another gift shop selling shot glasses and coffee cups opening on its shores.

That kind of touristy kitsch has its place, but Jim Anderson wants to offer something different.

Anderson is opening this week Local Color, a gift shop in the Vidalia Conference and Convention Center that will serve as an extension of his catering business, Spice Thyme Catering.

The shop, filled with handmade offerings “that aren’t exactly gallery pieces” by artists who — even if they aren’t currently local — at least have a connection to the area, is intended to be unique.

“I’m not looking for Cypress knees painted to look like Santa Claus,” he said.

“Everything I have here, you can find one in one place and another in a different place, but I have the only place you can find all of them at once.”

Items for sale — among others — include bracelets made of bicycle spokes, bottle openers made with deer horns, handmade mugs with faces, casts of mastodon teeth, flint arrowheads, diddley-bows and a knife made of a buffalo jaw.

Other offerings include plant hangers, repurposed bottle-cap art, mancala boards made of driftwood and food items such as spices.

“I kind of want to specialize in men’s collectables,” Anderson said. “These are things you’d feel comfortable buying your father-in-law to put on his desk.”

Anderson said the idea for the shop came after riverboats started docking on the Vidalia riverfront a couple of years ago.

“It’ll give people a chance to get off the boat, use the convention center and get a light snack,” he said.

“It’ll also help with the conventions we have now, because you need at least a place to go get gum.”

Starting Wednesday, the shop will offer a limited menu lunch from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Anderson said the menu will include salad plates, sandwiches and casseroles.

During the hours food is served, Anderson said he will have bistro tables set out in the foyer at the convention center, and — weather permitting — a few tables outside on the river walk. A drink station will be open for self-serve drinks.

“I wanted to offer something different to the people who work on the riverfront or who come in on the boats, or just people who want something different,” he said.

“We get enough activity on the riverfront, and I just wanted to bring more people into the building. We have the best view of Natchez, and it can be a relaxing, cool experience.”

Anderson said he’s also planning to develop and sell tickets to tours out of the gift shop, tours that highlight different aspects of the area’s history and points of interest than much of the more-established tourism industry, he said.

Those tours could include looks at local alcohol producers, Nellie Jackson’s famed bordello on Rankin Street and — for those who think of history in terms of millions and billions of years — geological surveys around the area, he said.

“I call them ‘off the beaten path,’ tours,” Anderson said.

For more information about Locol Color, visit facebook.com/spicethymecatering.