Fast Food Watch: McDonald's Goes Bananas for 'Minions'

We’ve seen McDonald’s do movie tie-in promotions before, but the deal for Minions, which opens this week, is like a damn restaurant takeover, so extensive is the number of menu items and the redecoration of both staff and store.

McDonald’s counter areas, signage, and uniforms have all gone Minions yellow. Staff t-shirts feature “Banana” in both English and transliterated Chinese. And so does the menu.

There’s like a 40-piece chicken dish that I didn’t go anywhere near. I’m sure there’s lots of chicken and it will taste like McNuggets.

I settled on something that had appeared recently on the McDonald’s menu, but not in the new banana format, but with an apple pie: the banana chocolate sundae. This is a very natural but slightly strange addition to the McDonald’s menu because although using the ice cream machine to dump soft ice cream on a pie seems straightforward, it also requires a McDonald’s associate to break the pie in half and arrange it so that the pie halves are on the sides of the bowl, followed by putting the ice cream in the middle, and the chocolate sauce on top. That’s quite a bit more assembly than is usually undertaken by front-counter folks.

The interesting thing is that the ice cream doesn’t taste so much like banana, but especially in the presence of chocolate sauce, tastes like caramel popcorn, or the sweet popcorn you get in Chinese cinemas.

That said, it’s a great summer treat. The bananas in the pie do taste like bananas, and the combination of banana, caramel corn, and chocolate works well. For RMB 13, it might put a smile on your face at the end of a hot and less than great day. Or take a kid to see Minions and split one of these afterwards and you’ll be a hero.

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Photo: Steven Schwankert/the Beijinger