Nobody here but us Chickens! (Nandos)

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Nandos
Date:	20/07/09 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great food, cheap, bottomless soft drinks

Disadvantages: Mistakes on orders, often too busy, paying upfront

Nando's is a tough restaurant to review. There's no chance of a witty punning title that they've not already thought of and put somewhere on their menu, the wall, the sign outside, someone's t-shirt. Their easy-going marketing style really is punchably irritating.

In spite of these reservations, however, I'm quite a regular diner at Nando's - from the faintly respectable echoing warehouse of the Southwark branch to the 'chavs on first dates' hellhole in Harrow. Because they make damn good chicken, basically.

Wimbledon is the branch closest to me, and so it's the one I find myself in most often. It's opposite the Wetherspoons and within a two minute walk of any fast food chain you care to mention, so I'd imagine competition is pretty tough.

For those who don't know, Nando's is a chain of Portugese-flavoured restaurants that specialise in grilled chicken in peri-peri sauce. The staff (in London branches at least) usually South African, and the whole setup, from the excruciatingly chatty menus to the sharing platters available, all seems to be striving for an 'eating out is fun' message.

I already know that eating out is fun, and I don't need an underpaid student wearing a bright red t-shirt saying 'hot chick' (or somesuch) to tell me so.

The Wimbledon restaurant is a fairly cosy example of the chain, with only eight or nine tables downstairs (and a whole upper floor, but never mind).

On entering, you'll be greeted by one of the aforementioned staff, who will ask you if you've been to Nandos before. Basically this is a polite way of making sure customers know they have to order all their food at once and pay upfront.

When you're taken to your table, you get given a bizarre plastic chicken on a stick and a menu. When you've made your selection, the bill payer goes to the bar and places the order, paying for it at the same time.

Now, I've kind of got used to this system through familiarity, but it does actually get on my tits. You can't get so much as a second beer put on to a bill, and they MUST lose out on drinks sales as a result. And, frankly, what if there's a problem with your food? You've already paid for it and have very little room to argue. And in some of the branches, you're weirdly expected to tip the waiters even though you're effectively doing about two thirds of their job for them.

The selection is limited, but that's fair enough. You go to Nando's for chicken, and if you don't like chicken then... well, you can get a steak roll or something. When you order your chicken (either as wings, quarter or half a chicken, perhaps even a chicken fillet burger), you're asked if you want it VERY HOT, HOT, MEDIUM or LEMON & HERB. Although the VERY HOT variety should always be approached with caution, I've found that the strength of all these sauces does vary from restaurant to restaurant. For the record, Wimbledon is a pretty tame one, it seems to me, and I can eat VERY HOT chicken there without even breaking a sweat.

You can get your chicken with a range of sides: chips, corn, salad or rice - so it's up to you how unhealthy you want to be.

When the food arrives, it's always really tasty. The chicken is always moist, the sauce is full of flavour (and pain), extras like Peri-Peri chips and the utterly awesome 'perinnaise' perk it up no end, and you can also get bottomless soft drinks for about two quid. I always do this. With all the beers coming in bottles, it's an expensive restaurant to drink alcohol in, particularly given that absolutely everything they serve has the potential to make you very thirsty indeed.

Once you've eaten until you've burst, there's a limited selection of desserts, but I can honestly say I've never seen anyone eating one in Wimbledon. I guess if you're still hungry after eating half a chicken and chips, then a bit of fudge cake won't even touch the sides.

In fact, it's only at the end of the meal, as you sit back in a haze of gluttony, that you realise the single good point about paying for your meal upfront. You can just wander out to enjoy your indigestion - no making small talk across a pile of dirty plates while trying to catch the waiter's eye.

My typical Nando's meal in the Wimbledon branch would be a quarter roast chicken (VERY HOT) with Peri-Peri chips and coleslaw, along with 5 Nando's Wings (VERY HOT) and a tub of Perinnaise. With one other person and two lots of bottomless soft drinks, this comes out at just under £20 - which is a pretty good value meal out by any standards.

Problems with the experience include the busyness (it's ALWAYS rammed, and expect loads of children running around everywhere), general lack of disabled access - there are tables downstairs in the Wimbledon branch, but they're always the first to be filled, so you'd have to reserve a table - and they never seem too happy with that.

In fact, the Wimbledon branch is basically pretty standard in terms of the sit down experience. And I'd normally give the chain four stars for good food, attractive prices and general atmosphere.

Wimbledon loses a star though, for all the problems we've had with the takeaway service. We have various incentive schemes, reward schemes and, well, bets in the office, and most of them end up with people buying Nando's for everyone else. Because we all like chicken.

On no less than three occasions out of the last four, they've got our order wrong. No cheese and pineapple in my burger, only three servings of wings instead of four, Medium rather than VERY HOT chicken - you name it, they've messed it up. And although they always try and sort these mistakes out afterwards, it's a 15 minute long walk from our office to the restaurant, for us to get compensation for a mistake they made.

There was also the time we wanted 40 wings. To go round quite a few people, don't get me wrong. But we wanted 40. We phoned the order in well ahead of time, but when I went to collect them they not only hadn't bothered to start cooking them, but they weren't sure they had enough and treated me like some kind of deviant chicken wing fetishist. We just wanted some bloody chicken wings, and if that was some kind of problem we'd have been just as happy to go to Morrisons.

Oh, and never expect to see the same member of staff twice. While that's a feature of the restaurant industry in general, it does seem to apply to Wimbledon in particular. With such a high turnover, you have to wonder about their employment practices and working conditions.

So, a recommendation based on the food alone, but with some serious reservations about their Wimbledon branch.

Summary: Yummy chicken, but patchy service.