In Memory of Gus Piazza

Just saw this in the Advocate -- Gus was an incredible man and a true LSU legend. We will miss him so much.

Ex-Phils Oyster Bar Owner Gus Piazza Dies at 55

"Gustave “Gus” Anthony Piazza Sr., a retired Baton Rouge restaurateur remembered for his wide array of friends and willingness to use those connections to help people, died Wednesday. He was 55.

Piazza “knew the governor on down” through his outgoing personality and his restaurant, Phil’s Oyster Bar, said Joe Dean, who had served as LSU’s athletic director for 14 years. Piazza’s friends met daily at the restaurant, where the “back-room guys” had lunch, mingled and traded favors, most of Piazza’s coming in the form of hard-to-get sports tickets.

Piazza, a New Orleans native, attended college in the 1970s at LSU, where he was an equipment manager for the football team and developed his love for the university, said his youngest son, Jordan Piazza, 19. While at LSU, Gus Piazza managed an oyster bar attached to Phil Tuminello’s seafood market, purchasing a stake in the restaurant a year out of college. Phil’s Oyster Bar became a second home for Piazza for the next 32 years, until he was forced to close the restaurant in June because of declining health, said Wallace Heck, a friend for nearly 30 years.

Piazza was an insider who lived LSU athletics and Louisiana politics and will be remembered for his personality and kindness, said Baton Rouge attorney Nathan Fisher, another longtime friend. He said Piazza was one of the few people he had met who always tried to help people and usually was successful. “You couldn’t put a number on (his friends),” Jordan Piazza said. “He touched everybody’s life.”