by One last turn as I slid on my skis towards a hut with half a meter of snow, the words “McSki” and a familiar yellow M.
I paid the smiling waiter and, moments later, I was skiing with my prize: an apple pie stuffed in a McDonald’s paper bag to enjoy in the snow.
This was my third attempt to shoot a sequence that could hold its own among the many viral clips of the world’s only ski through McDonald’s and it wasn’t going very well. “It’s always been a trend, but last season was special,” said Mustafa Ghannam who manages the restaurant’s seasonal fast food team in Sälen, Sweden, as he scrolled to find the most viral video of them all.
It’s a 22-year-old Dutch woman named Irene De Wit, and Ghannam’s own bearded face is grinning in the window.
“There were many videos but the one I’m in” – he checked his phone – “had 7.57 million views. And he is not the only one. There were at least five videos and they all have five million plus.”
Most of McSki’s clips, he said, have been posted by skiers from outside of Sweden, to whom McSki, who has had the Sälen game since 1996, is new. “This season has been great because there are so many people from other countries here, so many from Denmark, Germany, Holland,” said Aron Johannes, the restaurant’s supervisor.
Linda Morell, head of public relations at SkiStar, who owns everything in this part of Sälen, including the McDonald’s building, put the rise down to the bottom of the Swedish krone. “What is interesting this year, in particular, is that there is an 80 per cent increase in the number of English visitors. We have never had so many English guests. It’s an all-time high,” she said.
On the day I visited it was blizzarding outside, and, apart from my attempts to recreate viral stardom, the only traffic the ski was getting was a Danish woman grabbing takeaways .
Inside the restaurant, I threw up to one of the three banks of screens in my ski gear to find that the McDonald’s staple, Filet-O-Fish, was 34 kronor (£2.60), a great deal cheaper than the British price of £ 4.69. The basic cheeseburgers I ordered for my kids cost 15 kronor (£1.13), again cheaper than in the UK (£1.39).
The price isn’t the only difference to your average British McDonald’s. In an attempt to mimic the Swedish hunting lodge, a cowbell hangs from a column in the middle of the restaurant and the walls are a mix of stone and wood panels. Families and groups of friends with flushed faces sat at long tables, adding to the Alpine atmosphere.
As well as the McSki collection window, the McCafé concession was doing a brisk trade in hot chocolate, cinnamon buns and pralines, with servers rushing out with table orders – we returned between runs to boost our energy with hot chocolates and coffees.
“When I was little, it was a big thing to go skiing through,” remembered Matilda Håkansson, a 20-year-old SkiStar instructor who had been coming to Sälen all her life, as she toyed with Mac Mór . . Her colleague Rasmus Månsson, who maintains the snow park, told me that he had seen one of the clips: “Someone sent it to me, because they thought it was great that I was living now. It’s like it’s different. It is the only one in the world.”
Morell put the increase in foreign, and particularly British, visitors down to the opening of the nearby Scandinavian Mountains Airport in 2019, with direct flights from London Gatwick between February and April, and twice a week via Copenhagen during of the season.
“I also think more and more English people are starting to look north, because of the security of the snow,” she said. His boss sparked controversy a few years ago when he predicted that Sälen would still have snow long after the Alps.
“It’s a very special McDonald’s. Everyone is happy, everyone is on vacation,” Johannes told me.
“When we’re not working we’re skiing or snowboarding, and then we’re partying at the après-ski,” he said, using the faux-English word for après-ski that you hear over and over again. another in Sälen.
As I was about to leave, Ghannam pointed out that De Wit, the one behind the most viral post, was part of a group of Dutch influencers who showed SkiStar around, which perhaps explains why his post almost eight million views and mine less than 50.
She commented when I tagged her though: “Aaah nice!! “
Fundamentals
SkiScandinavia offers seven nights at SkiStar Lodge Lindvallen from £1,169, departing from 7 April 2024, including direct flights to Scandinavia Airport and transfer, based on two adults and two children sharing. For more information on visiting the resort visit skistar.com.
Richard was a guest at SkiStar.
