After the game, time to eat
On the rink menu: Pizza, wings and lots of greasy fare
“Usually, they order pizza. But from time to time, they go with Bell Centre hotdogs. They love those hotdogs.”
CANADIENS PIERRE GERVAIS EQUIPMENT MANAGER
BUFFALO — The third period of the game between the Buffalo Sabres and the St. Louis Blues had just begun at the First Niagara Center, and the delivery from Ricota’s Pizza & Subs had arrived at the security entrance right on time. The dressing room attendant met the delivery men, and together they lugged the order into the Blues’ room.
When the Blues tramped in after the game, there it was, a feast fit for a 4-1 victory: 12 turkey subs, 12 roast beef subs, one sheet pizza and, this being Buffalo, 50 chicken wings. St. Louis Blues centre Derek Roy, a fan of Ricota’s from his days with the Sabres, had his own special order: one sheet pizza, one large pepperoni pizza and 100 wings.
A pile of pizza boxes is a common post-game sight in visitors’ dressing rooms around the National Hockey League. Players grab a quick slice or sandwich while changing, showering and talking to reporters in the roughly 40 minutes they have before the team bus leaves for the airport.
The usual procedure is for the home team’s equipment manager to offer a menu from a trusted local restaurant, or several restaurants, to his counterpart on the visiting team. The visitors make their selections; the home team’s staff calls in the order; and the restaurant delivers it fresh and hot to the rink. The food must arrive just after the second intermission, so as not to distract the players with the tantalizing aroma of wings and hot sauce while they prepare for the final period.
Around the league, equipment managers have their favoured delivery places — big national or regional pizza chains in some cities, neighbourhood mom-and-pop restaurants in others. At Madison Square Garden, the pizza usually comes from Famous Amadeus, a couple of blocks away; at Nassau Coliseum, from Borrelli’s Italian Restaurant in East Meadow, N.Y.; at Prudential Center, from one of a handful of little places in Newark, N.J.: Queen Pizza II, Mama’s Pizza or Mike’s Coffee Shop and Pizzeria.
In Philadelphia, cheese steaks are part of the mix, usually from Steak ’Em Up, and in Pittsburgh, the pizzas and hoagies most often come from Giovanni’s or Pizza Milano. In the Carolina Hurricanes’ Raleigh, N.C., arena — the NHL rink widely considered to have the best inhouse catering — the pizzas are made on site. In Vancouver, visiting players look forward to the beef jerky made by one of the Canucks’ at- tendants. And for teams visiting Montreal, the post-game meal might be pizza from Bocci Resto-Café in LaSalle, or it might be Bell Centre’s own famous chiens chaud.
“Usually they order pizza, but from time to time, they go with Bell Centre hotdogs,” said Pierre Gervais, the Canadiens’ equipment manager. “They love those hotdogs.”
At the First Niagara Center, visiting teams favour a handful of places that serve Buffalo-style pizza — thicker than in New York, but much thinner than in Chicago, with pizza sauce light on the sugar and salt. Ricota’s gets the call about 30 times each season, said Samir Khoury, one of the brothers who own the modest pizzeria and grocery store in an old south Buffalo neighbourhood.
“To know that professional hockey players like my pizza and wings, it makes me proud,” he said.
The opportunity arrived six or seven years ago on U.S. Thanksgiving. The usual places were closed, Khoury said, but a friend who worked with the Sabres’ equipment manager knew that Ricota’s would be open. He was from the Valley, a hardscrabble neighbourhood so obscure and sparsely populated that many Buffalonians have not even heard of it, and he knew that Khoury and his brothers opened Ricota’s for a few hours every holiday because there are no other stores nearby and many residents do not have cars.
“He called and asked, ‘Can you make food for the Montreal Canadiens?’ ” Khoury said. “So I called my brother Michael, woke him up and said, ‘Get down here.’ It was a $250 order, and they tipped $50 because it was so cheap.”
Ricota’s soon became a go-to place for NHL teams in Buffalo. The Khoury brothers and their crew would keep an eye on the Sabres game on TV as they whipped up the food, watching for the start of the second intermission so they could time the 10-minute drive to the rink to the moment the intermission ended.
The NHL players who lived in Buffalo became Ricota’s devotees too. Roy, Thomas Vanek and Maxim Afinogenov would get pizza and wings delivered to their luxurious harbourside apartments. The Khoury brothers started stocking Weber’s mustard, a local brand, because Lindy Ruff liked it on his ham subs. Patrick Kane, the Chicago Blackhawks star who grew up in south Buffalo, has twice brought the Stanley Cup to his local favourite, Imperial Pizza, but Khoury does not mind.
“Patrick also knows our place, and we’re proud of him as a south Buffalo boy,” said Khoury, who moved to the neighbourhood from Lebanon as a 13-year-old in 1974 and spent his teenage years playing hockey on its quiet streets.
In 1988, Khoury bought the store from its original owners, who had opened it in 1932, long before the surrounding steel mill and chemical plants closed and were demolished, leaving vacant lots, a few frame houses, a church and Ricota’s behind.
“Our business and our neighbourhood is not big,” Khoury said. “For a small business like me, these orders mean a lot.”
Most often, players in postgame dressing rooms take a few bites of the food from Ricota’s and the other pizza places around the NHL, and leave the rest.
“Usually, the last thing you eat before a game is a bagel and a banana at 4 p.m., so after a game, you might be starving, so you just grab a bite or two of pizza,” Rangers forward Derick Brassard said. “But to tell you the truth … It’s too hard on my stomach.”
Some players now have protein shakes, prepared by the team’s strength and conditioning coach, awaiting them after games. But the draw of good, greasy food is hard to resist — especially when it is justified by trainers’ belief that players should resupply their bodies with carbohydrates, protein and fat within half an hour of exercise.
“I liked it in Boston when we’d order from Pinocchio’s,” the Rangers’ Dominic Moore said, wistfully recalling the Cambridge pizza place.
Martin Biron, the recently retired Rangers goalie who played for four NHL teams, said: “It’s funny, because we’d go into a city and somebody would say, ‘Oh, the pizza’s terrible here.’ It would be like guys would remember who’s got good pizza and who doesn’t. You’d play in Montreal and you’d know, hey, if we win tonight, we’re going to get like 50 hotdogs in the middle of the room after the game, and they’d smell so good. Those are little incentives, I guess.”
Biron added, “Depending on where you were, there might be some special treat.”
Back in the Valley, the crew reflected for a moment on the special treat they had prepared for the St. Louis Blues.
“I haven’t seen a home game since I started working here,” said T.J. Martinek, a cook who has worked at Ricota’s for a year. But he was OK with that.
“It feels good knowing they’ll eat the food we make,” he said.