Norway’s most famous convenience store draws crowds as newspaper tour grills free beef

A traveling news team from Dagbladet set up a grill outside Eurospar Brokelandsheia on Monday, serving free steak to hundreds of visitors at Norway’s most viral convenience store, where owner Tore Solstad has built a social media following by turning butchery into entertainment.

“Usually when you get samples, you just get a little,” Solstad told the crowd as smoke rose from the grill. “Here, you can eat until you’re full.” The newspaper’s branded camper van—emblazoned with its slogan “Akkurat nå!” (“Right now!”)—parked beside the entrance while Solstad, 50, seared Argentine sirloin over an industrial grill, fat crackling into the flames.

The stop marked the second week of Dagbladet’s 10-week summer road trip across Norway, a tour that began last week and will crisscross the country in the paper’s signature camper. Brokelandsheia, a rural outpost in Gjerstad municipality (population: 2,505), was an obvious first destination: its Eurospar store, perched on the border of Agder and Telemark, drew 224 million kroner in sales last year—fueled in part by Solstad’s Facebook videos, which rack up hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views.

“We started posting in 2016 just for fun,” Solstad said. “Then it blew up. We realized: this is what we should do.” Since then, the store hasn’t spent a krone on marketing. Instead, clips of Solstad bellowing for “Bartolo!”—his 27-year-old store manager, Sindre De Bartolo—carving animal carcasses, or laughing behind the meat counter have turned the shop into a pilgrimage site. “People come from all over,” Solstad said. “Not just from Agder or Telemark.”

By Monday afternoon, roughly 200 customers had lined up for steak bites, including locals like Knut Homdrom, whom Solstad called his “best customer.” “He’s here two, three times a day,” Solstad joked. Homdrom, a hunter, shrugged it off: “Det er bare rør” (“It’s all nonsense”). Others, like Vidar Rosseland from Kristiansand, had detoured specifically for the spectacle. “I think Dagbladet is being generous today,” Rosseland said. Solstad agreed: “We like that.”