Dinner at Burnsie’s: How meals at veteran player’s house make young Canes feel at home

Seth Jarvis is actually closer in age to Brent Burns’ kids than he is Burns, so when Jarvis is invited over for dinner, he sometimes spends as much time with the three youngsters as he does his elder teammate. Which, in a way, is kind of the point.

No one’s been over for dinner at Burnsie’s more than Jarvis, but no one on the Carolina Hurricanes is quite as much on his own at such a young age.

Dinner at Burnsie’s. If you’re in the Hurricanes’ locker room, that phrase carries with it a cornucopia of associations: prime meats and wild game, some butchered by Burns himself, expertly grilled. A session in the sauna followed by a dip in the cold tub. Some video games with the kids — and maybe some time playing with dolls.

All of it precisely the kind of atmosphere someone like Jarvis, newly 21 and living on his own far from home, or some of the Hurricanes’ international players, might miss over the course of a long season.

It’s only Burns’ first season with the Hurricanes, but the 38-year-old defenseman has brought more to the team than elite blue-line play and an improbably unkempt beard. He’s provided not only sustenance but a turnkey family to the players who need it most.

“It’s a family environment and that’s something I miss a lot, just being on my own,” Jarvis said. “I don’t have people come down and visit me very often. It’s nice to be around a family. And Burnsie himself is a character.”

Hockey aside, Burns is a character who serves elk and axis deer he harvests and butchers himself from his ranch in Texas, a character who has refined his state-of-the-art cooking methods — there’s almost always something simmering sous vide at the Burns house, and his reverse-sear technique on the grill includes a dedicated Yeti cooler for resting meat without losing the crust — and a character who has not only food but a family to share with his younger teammates.

“I’ve got three kids at home, we’re cooking meals,” Burns said. “If you’re a young guy, cooking for yourself, maybe you haven’t learned to cook, but I love to do it. It’s fun. Sometimes at the rink you don’t get that much time to hang out. It’s been fun. My son loves it, loves hanging with them, playing video games with the boys. You have different talks, get different time to hang out, just relax in a different atmosphere. Usually here it’s pretty rushed. It’s fun to do.”

Seth Jarvis, honorary Finn

No one’s been over to Burns’ house more than Jarvis — “It probably means I need the most help,” Jarvis said — who figures he’s in double figures at this point. He was there the night after the first game of the playoffs, when Burns’ wife Susan was surprised to find out that Jarvis isn’t Finnish, as much time as he spends around Sebastian Aho and as much time as he spends in Burns’ sauna. (“Looked like a Finnish sauna,” sauna expert Jesperi Kotkaniemi said. “Pretty good.”)

But Aho’s been to dinner as well, and Kotkaniemi, and Teuvo Teravainen, and Andrei Svechnikov. Some of the veterans have not-100-percent-playfully groused about their invitations that never arrived — “You gotta ask Burnsie why he doesn’t ask all his teammates, that’s your story,” Jordan Martinook said — but if there’s a common thread, it’s that the guys who get invited are guys without kids who are a long way from home.

What they don’t have, Burns has.

“It’s just who he is,” Aho said. “He has the set-up. He has the meats. He’s been around for a long time. But they’re nice people, an awesome family. I think they also like having people around them. It’s kind of a win-win.”

And he does have the meats. In the end, as much as the Finns love Burns’ sauna (and Aho has one of his own at home) and as much as everyone enjoys his kids, it’s the meals that they really remember.

Burns is best known for serving prime cuts of his own elk — familiar, again, to the Finns, especially to a northerner like Aho — but he supplements it with steaks and Wagyu beef he purchases from a special purveyor. While Burns is working the grill, his wife Susan handles the vegetables. It all makes for a memorable meal.

“It’s pretty good,” Svechnikov said. “I didn’t want to leave.”

Burns certainly isn’t alone in entertaining his teammates — Antti Raanta had his Finnish countrymen over for a pre-playoff brunch — but he takes it farther than anyone else. And the entire team got a taste of it when Burns — only a few months into his Hurricanes tenure — hosted the players for Thanksgiving.

That’s a bit unusual, for a newcomer to host such an important team-bonding function. Typically, someone like Jordan Staal would take on that responsibility, a captain or established veteran (or both). But just as Burns arrived in Raleigh early before the season and helped set the tone for pre-camp workouts by being not only one of the team’s oldest players but one of its fittest, he willingly embraced the Thanksgiving assignment.

“Not only Burnsie but Susan as well, that family is very welcoming, very social,” Staal said. “They wanted to host it, and my wife wasn’t going to argue.”

The spread was massive: five turkeys, six giant tomahawk ribeyes and a few elk steaks for good measure. Everyone brought side dishes, which meant there were four or five different approaches to green-bean casserole to sample. Staal and his family brought not only meatballs, but his parents, who were in town.

It was an early supper; the Hurricanes, who had lost four in a row, flew to Boston that evening, where they suffered a narrow overtime loss that nevertheless seemed to spark something. They won 15 of the next 16, and there are a few people around the team who credit that Thanksgiving dinner for giving the Hurricanes a chance to hit the reset button and, while not to put too fine a point on it, set the tone for the rest of the season.

“Thanksgiving, that was awesome,” Aho said. “A lot of people in the house. They did an awesome job. That was unreal.”

‘Daddy doesn’t do that’

There’s also no question this is a two-way street. Burns’ daughter Peyton is 13, and daughter Olivia is 4 — “Every time, she wants to show me her room, like I haven’t been there before,” Jarvis said — and his son Jagger is 11 and starting to get into hockey. This is a chance for him to hang out with the players he’s come to know and admire over the course of the season.

Jagger and Svechnikov once engaged in a multi-game NHL 23 battle, after Jagger beat Svechnikov in the opener and Svechnikov insisted they keep playing until he finally won one. Jarvis firmly believes that Jagger looks at him like any other of his friends, age difference aside.

“That’s kind of the fun part,” Burns said. “Obviously, they’re at the age now where they kind of know. They’ll be getting pucks and collecting stuff. They’re aware. My son, he’s a hockey guy now. He just loves hockey. He watches far more games than me. He tells me, ‘Fishy (Aho) is so good, Nechy (Martin Necas) did that, how come you don’t do that?’ Daddy doesn’t do that.”

Burns is, to an extent, being modest. His spin at the blue line in Game 6 of the first-round series against New York Islanders, reversing course and then darting down the slot, channeled his inner Bobby Orr or Brian Leetch. His all-around play this season on the top defensive pairing with Slavin is a big factor in the Hurricanes’ success.

But the defenseman-slash-outdoorsman-slash-grillmaster also quickly figured out where he can contribute off the ice. If Burns’ cooking on the grill has helped Jarvis cook on the ice, it’s also clear that that’s not the only need he has fed.

“I think he sees maybe a little of himself in me, just the energy,” Jarvis said. “We like having fun. Don’t take ourselves too-too seriously. I’ve got a hell of a lot to learn from him, but it’s nice to be around him. I think he sensed that. I’m also not cooking for myself very often, so he helped me out there.”

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