Nando's: Fast food to be excited about?

The Portuguese/Mozambican Peri-Peri chicken joint has had foodies and celebrities alike all excited. The question our critic asks this week is why?

I went with an open mind, I really did. Like seemingly so many others who, for better or for worse, take food a little more seriously than is perhaps necessary, I was led to believe that Nando’s was an excellent fast food restaurant. An unlikely puff piece in the Observer Food Monthly last year reinforced its place as a good all-rounder, somewhere the dustman could be found on the next table to Pixie Lott, and not the sort of dive you felt you had to leave in a mac and dark glasses.

So, as I say I went expecting to enjoy the food, the bonhomie, the spice, the Portuguese wine list, and myself.

On arrival

We sit down and the waitress asks the dreaded question. “Have you been to Nando’s before?” For a second I hesitate, unsure whether or not I can face the ensuing explanation, but eventually confirm that no, I haven’t. She talks us through the menu. “These are the salads,” she says, pointing at the bit on the menu that says ‘salads’, and I nod along and try and pretend that without such illumination I’d have been all at sea, ordering ice cream for my starter and chicken wings for pudding.

She then tells us that we have to go and order at the bar. I actually quite like this part. By the end of a meal, half-drunk and sleepy, I hate having to make chit-chat while waiting twenty minutes for the bill – I’d much rather get the hell out of there, though in the case of Nando’s I didn’t at this point know just how swiftly I’d want to escape.

To start

We start with a bowl of Peri-Peri nuts, a plate of chicken wings, cold beer and white wine. Most dishes – wings included – can be ordered according to preference of spice, and our hot wings are, considering what’s to follow, cruelly delicious; spicy and sticky and so moreishly salty that my beer is gone in three gulps. The wine – all the wine, actually – seems good on the nose but thin on the palate, which is probably due to the staggering levels of salt and chilli swilling around my mouth.

For non-drinkers, or those who wish their children to unleash merry hell on the rest of the diners, there are free refills on the soft drinks. A bit like at Pizza Hut.

The mains

Mains then. Takes a deep breath.

A hot half-chicken (fresh, tick; British, tick; not free range, big-fat-red-mark-fury-anger-what-the-hell-are-they-thinking?) is hot and I can confirm that it is half a chicken but that’s about as good as it gets. Though not actively bad there is little to recommend it. It’s decently cooked and well-textured but the chef has mistaken lemon for flavour and so it tastes of citrus, not chicken.

Peri-Peri chips are a disaster. The spiced salt, instead of being mixed through the BK-standard fries, has been dumped on top and just sort of clings to the grease, so the few chips I eat are cloaked in spice and salt and really quite unpleasant.

A couscous salad with chicken is bad picnic food – anaemic pieces of protein on a too-sweet and too-dry lunchbox salad.

Nando’s defy you to find a better mashed potato than theirs. I defy you to find a worse outside of a school canteen. My friend Tobie says it's like the mashed potato he makes. This isn’t meant as a compliment.

Corn on the cob lacks sweetness and is a touch overcooked but is OK. Mediterranean salad comes without smoked paprika dressing and without cucumber, whose watery coolness would have been welcome among the continuing battery of spice and salt. It’s all so salty.

I am about to say the chicken burger has far too much mayo, but my sister then sheepishly confesses to adding a hefty thwack herself, so I’m unable to comment other than to say the mayo tastes like kebab-shop mayo, and thus the burger tastes like something from Dixy Chicken.

There are various sauces which are graded in hotness, though I’d suggest they changed the grading system to ‘how much do you want to taste your food?’, or possibly ‘how much of a challenge would you like tomorrow morning’s poo to be?’

Onto the pudding

For pudding a frozen yoghurt is how Mr Whippy might taste if his wife left him for a Zoom taking all the Flakes with her. Cheesecake could plaster a wall. Coffee is fine. I can’t wait to leave the flat, airless dungeon and din of effnik music, and make my way home feeling both increasingly angry and sick.

My verdict

Why, I kept asking myself. Why do people – people whose opinions I respect and share and follow – why do they like this place so much? I ran through the meal again and again in my mind. Was I being fussy? Was it actually OK for what it was? Were Nando’s maybe just having an off day?

I don’t think so. I think Nando’s is a bad restaurant serving bad food. I’m angry that it has the gall to boast that its chicken isn’t frozen but won’t buy free-range. I’m bewildered that so many people have been tricked into thinking it is any better than any other high street chain. Most of all I’m really disappointed, because for a minute there I was excited to have found a cheapish restaurant in town where I could sit down and eat and have a beer without spending more than a tenner.

Ten years ago an advert ran in South Africa in which a blind woman walks down the street with a bag of Nando’s. Her dog callously guides her straight into a lamppost before gobbling the dropped chicken. It was taken off air because it was seen as being offensive to blind people. I say poor dog.

What do you think?

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