World travelling hockey pro settles in to a tasty future
The reindeer meat wasn’t bad, as he recalls. Even the blood sausage was quite tasty.
In a hockey journey that led him from the American south to Fin- land and Sweden with stops in Europe along the way — including a year at home in Hamilton with the AHL Bulldogs — he’d experienced pretty much every culinary option possible. Some bordering on the highly unusual. Which was actually part of the fun of the whole international experience. If someone put something on his plate, he ate it and generally liked it.
Until last year in Norway when he met his match.
“They liked pickled herring,” Joey Tenute laughs. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Kimchi might’ve been next on his list. A generous contract from a pro team in South Korea arrived on his desk not long ago offering more-than-decent money for another year overseas. That country may not be known as a hockey hotbed but apparently they’re trying.
He thought about it, just as he’d thought about the other offers from across Europe. But each time he walked through the front door of his Ancaster home after summer four-on-four games, his wife,
two-year-old son and two-monthold daughter were waiting for him. Leaving again was suddenly just too much to ask.
So he retired. After a dozen years as a pro, and four seasons in the OHL before that, the St. Thomas More alum was a former hockey player which left him with a rather huge question. What does a 34year-old, who’s given his life to a sport, do when it’s over?
“I never really knew,” he says. “I was all-in with hockey.”
He started thinking about coaching. Maybe scouting. Perhaps something else in the game. Possibly firefighting. Then the obvious answer hit him. What would be the perfect business opportunity for an Italian hockey player from the Hamilton Mountain? Middle Eastern food, of course. Yes, this probably does require some explanation.
When Tenute and his now-wife started dating, he’d never had a falafel. Never had tabouli, never had baklava, never had kibbeh.
“I had not had any of this stuff,” he says.
That wasn’t going to last long since his wife’s father had arrived in this city from Lebanon several decades ago and opened a restaurant called La Luna. In subsequent years, the family had started a second location and three La Luna Express restaurants. So it was natural he’d be introduced to it on one of their first dates.
Mr. Eat-His-Way-Around-TheWorld was sold after that one dinner. He immediately started eating it nearly every day he was home. Now that he was looking for a new career, helping grow the business made all kinds of sense. His plan quickly became all about turning something he loved that was already successful into something bigger.
“One of the goals we have is to expand and make La Luna something that we can put in cities that aren’t just Hamilton,” he says.
Right now he’s working out of the James Street South location with his brother-in-law and learning the ropes. Soon the expansion plans will begin in earnest.
In the meantime, he’s doing fine without hockey. After nearly 750 regular-season and playoff games in the pros, he figures he’d accomplished everything he wanted.
“I wish I won the Stanley Cup,” he laughs.
OK, he accomplished almost everything.
He won a Calder Cup. He got to play for his hometown team. He walked away healthy. He played an NHL game and had a few shifts with Alex Ovechkin.
“He got stuck out on a long shift and I jumped on,” he quips.
And he’s not giving it up cold turkey. He’s signed up to play occasionally in a competitive 3-on-3 league. Partly because he still loves it and partly because his kids are too young to have many memories of his playing career. That’s something he thinks about now.
Even though it’s not the big time, he wants his son to have some memories of dad on the ice.
“I want my son to still watch me play hockey,” Tenute says. “I still want to be his favourite player.”