That sign. Shot from below, the Louisiana State Capitol rendered in gold sitting on top of the name like it belongs there, big Gulf Coast cumulus stacking up behind it.
Diesi’s Little Capitol sits off Interstate 10 in South Louisiana, between Breaux Bridge and Henderson — visible from the highway in a “you can’t miss it” kind of way. Every time I pass it, the same thing surfaces: a rhetoric classroom at LSU, 1983, a professor saying something offhand about Louisiana’s plans for surviving a Soviet nuclear strike basically amounting to crossing the river for coffee at Diesi’s.
The room laughed. I think I did too.
I’d been curious for a while about where the original location actually was — the one the professor would have meant. Started down a research rabbit hole, stumbled onto a post from Mitch Rabalais, who’s LSU’s Director of Government Relations and an amateur Louisiana historian. He laid out the whole story: the original Diesi’s was on U.S. 190 in St. Landry Parish, founded by Frank Diesi, who also served in both chambers of the Louisiana Legislature in the ’50s and ’60s. The place functioned as an informal neutral ground — somewhere North Louisiana and South Louisiana legislators could meet outside Baton Rouge and hash things out without the formality of the Capitol. That’s where the name came from. Not branding. Actual function.
I called Diesi’s to confirm the former location. They did.
In the end it wasn’t a Soviet missile that got it. On January 6, 1986, a natural gas explosion leveled the Krotz Springs location. Nobody seriously hurt. I found that out through the East Baton Rouge Parish Library’s digital archive — of all places!
Frank’s son Sal eventually moved the business. The bridge on 190 near where the first one stood is now named the Frank and Sal Diesi Bridge.
So my professor made that joke in 1983. Three years later the place was gone.
He was referencing something still very much alive when he said it — the informal nervous system of Louisiana politics, a second capitol forty miles from the real one, with governors on the walls instead of a gallery. I don’t know that changes the joke exactly. Maybe it just gives it a floor it didn’t have before.
Lagniappe:
