Nando’s Tastes of Cock

Once upon a time, a man decided to open a restaurant where the chicken was grilled freshly, ordering was simple and the staff were pleased to see you.  It’s a happy story about a happy kind of restaurant, but one which has absolutely nothing to do with the tale I’m about to relate.

Today, you see, we’re going to talk about Nando’s.  Let me make this clear: I don’t hate Nando’s.  I just think that every other restaurant in the universe is superior.  Some would say this makes Nando’s the worst diner in the world, but I say they’re just pessimists.  I understand how the human psyche works.  Trust me – I’m a doctor, albeit one who’s self-medicating heavy amounts of Rohypnol.

But hang on a sec…the chicken in Nando’s tastes pretty good, right?  And the place always seems so busy, with nice artwork on the walls and nice wholesome people enjoying their nice wholesome chicken.  Why on earth would you excoriate Nando’s, EU?  What did it do to warrant a torn arse-hole?

How long have you got?

Let’s remember: this is Edinburgh Uncovered, the place where nothing is resolved promptly but everything is resolved emphatically.  Let’s just say that in the time it takes to read this review, you would still be waiting for table service in Nando’s.

There are a myriad of reasons for hating Nando’s like a post-op pooch hates its plastic collar.  Ultimately though, it all boils down to this catch-all caveat:

Any restaurant that requests payment upfront has no faith in its food or no faith in its customers.

It’s that simple.

Chip-shop in Muirhouse?  F**k aye they’re gonna ask you for your grubby wee fiver before handing over that pickled egg.  Proper restaurant with real cutlery and shit?  Awa ya radge – there’s no danger I’m handing over ze muney.

You get what you pay for at Nando’s – LOL, jk

Paying upfront in a formal restaurant is like paying a hooker to score crack and expecting her to return with a 50 rock and a blowjob.  Ain’t happening bro – best toodle off home and drive the skin bus before her pimp shows and tugs it harder than even you’re accustomed to.

Picture the scene: you walk into a Nando’s – let’s say the Berner’s Street branch near Oxford Street.  Tonight you’re eating alone.  The upstairs section of the restaurant is full, so a waiter directs you to the seating area downstairs.  You find a table, sit down and begin scanning the menu.  Soon you’re ready to order.  You wait and you wait but there’s no sign of a waiter arriving to alleviate the interminable waiting.  Of course there isn’t – this is Nando’s after all, the world’s first restaurant-priced self-service cafe.

If the waiter won’t come to you, there’s only one thing for it – you’ll have to trudge upstairs and order for yourself.  There’s just one small problem: what do you do with your bag and jacket?  You can’t just leave them at your table while you gad off upstairs.  This is London after all.

So you sensibly decide to take your possessions with you.  Ten minutes later, you’ve reached the head of the queue and are hungrily placing your order: ‘A half chicken with hot peri-peri please.’

The assistant stares at you impatiently.  ‘Table number?’

Table number?  No one said anything about requiring a table number.  ‘I’m sat somewhere downstairs,’ you mumble.

‘Sorry, I need a table number,’ insists the Nando’s apparatchik.

You glumly retreat downstairs, only to find that in your absence your table has gone.  A couple now sit there, staunchly drawing lots to see who has to go and order while the other stays behind to guard the table.  In resignation, you track down the waiter and request a new table.

‘Sorry sir,’ he says, ‘we’ve nothing just now but if you pop back in half an hour…’

Ordering food in Nando’s is about as pleasant as a gun shot to the head.  Welcome to Jill Dando’s.

Nando’s chicken says: ‘I’m crying because of the piri-piri’

At EU, we pride ourselves on the impartiality of our reviews.  God forbid that a well-balanced weblog such as this should approach an assignment with an ulterior motive.  To do so would be grossly unprofessional and would undermine the credibility of this blog.

Worried that I might not have the stomach for Nando’s unique take on common courtesy, I went to the effort of starving myself all day.  From breakfast time until 7pm, nary a morsel passed my lips (unless you count that packet of Rohypnol).  By the time I reached Nando’s, I was so famished I could have happily eaten in the worst restaurant in the world.  If that chicken didn’t get licked to the bone, either the food was truly awful or I was Bobby Sands.

Nando’s chicken says: ‘I’m crying because I’d rather be a Zinger Tower’

Nando’s must be the first restaurant in the world that comes with a list of instructions just to order a meal.  Open the menu and you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading a staff training manual, but no, there they are – five steps to placing your order.  That’s less steps than it takes to cook the chicken.

How to Order Food the Nando’s Way

Step 1: Choose your food and then decide how spicy you want it.

I and my Nando’s-rimming mate (let’s just call him ‘Judas’ for the purposes of this review) order a whole chicken platter to share.  According to the chirpy menu, it’s ‘Perfect for 2-3 to share’.  That being the case, it should be more than enough to sate the treacherous disciple and I.  Sadly, it isn’t.  A whole chicken, it transpires, is just enough to feed one hungry person.  The price?  A mere £18.65.  In finer restaurants, you could buy half a lobster for that.

Nando’s chicken says: ‘I’m crying because I’d rather be a Christmas turkey’

Step 2: Go to the counter to order and pay.

How quaint.  It’s just like queueing for a pie at the football. One member of the group has to make the supreme sacrifice of venturing out before half time to wait in line. ‘You guys enjoy yourselves –  I’ll go and order food.  Let me know if I miss a goal.’  Let’s be clear: in Soviet Russia they queue for food.  In the UK, we prefer a waitress to come over and take our order.  How are you supposed to exchange small-talk and grab her number when there’s a queue of hungry diners chiding you to hurry up?

Step 3: Collect the sauces and dressings you fancy and any cutlery you need.  (Eating with fingers is encouraged – saves on washing up!)

I’m sure it is – anything that saves on effort in this restaurant is encouraged.  No doubt Nando’s would prefer it if we ate the chicken raw as it ‘saves on cooking’. The absence of cutlery certainly explains why the menus are so sticky.  If you need more peri-peri, don’t bother walking to the island to fetch it – just wring the menu out.  Interestingly, if you replace the exotic-sounding peri-peri sauce for the slightly less exotic ketchup and broon sauce, all you’re left with is a glorified burger outlet.  Nando’s churn out chicken like a greasy roadside van churns out bacon rolls.  Bosh, bosh, bosh – it’s just a production line.  Not happy with the food?  Slap some more sauce on.  Still not happy with the food?  That’s your fault for applying too much sauce.  Don’t blame the grill technicians – it’s not them, it’s you.  You’re to blame for everything that’s wrong with Nando’s.

You can choose any type of sauce you like in Nando’s but you can’t choose good service

Step 4: Your order is brought to your table as soon as chickenly possible.

So they bring us plates, but not utensils.  Do Nando’s operate some sort of tableware hierarchy?  Why do they trust us to run with knives but not walk with plates?

Step 5: Forgotten something?  Need extras or want a dessert?  No need to queue again – just ask.

Really?  So you do provide table service?  Why didn’t you tell us that in the first place, instead of making us go through that whole rigmarole?  Nando’s is that girl you take home who protests ‘We can’t do this, I’ve got a boyfriend’ and compels you to fall asleep spooning.  Then when you come round the next morning, she’s riding you like it was the last f**k on earth.  It’s all very nice, but why couldn’t it have been like that from the outset?

Service – what service?

The service in Nando’s could be charitably described as ‘selective’, or less charitably as ‘an abortion at 36 weeks’.  Let’s just recap: the staff will show you to your table but they won’t fetch your cutlery or take your order.  Do they all have chronic ME?  Are they worried that the social will withhold their disability allowance if they’re seen over-exerting themselves?

The contagion is spreading

Being a waiter in Nando’s is like pulling on a doctor’s outfit and sneaking into A&E for the thrill of it.  It’s all fun and games until someone wheels in a choking nut allergy victim and asks you to perform a tracheotomy.  Put a Nando’s waiter to work in a real restaurant – where they had to, like, write shit down and remember orders – and they’d be about as much use as a Nando’s waiter in a Nando’s restaurant.

You want to eat dinner with proper cutlery like some posh wanker?  Get it yourself.  You want butter on your sweetcorn?  Open the sachet yourself.  If the Department of Social Security showed the same level of compassion as Nando’s, the welfare bill would be eliminated overnight.  Amputee claiming disability allowance?  F**k off – you’ve still got one good leg.  If you’re well enough to hop around Nando’s on your crutches fetching cutlery, you’re well enough to get a job.

Many restaurants claim to offer an experience akin to eating home-cooked food, but only Nando’s are as good as their word.  Eating in one of their diners is just like eating at home – you have to do everything yourself.  Nando’s is the world’s first DIY restaurant.  Only Bear Grylls has to toil harder than a Nando’s customer for a hot meal.

Whereas Wagamama’s staff are intent on leaning over your shoulder every two minutes to deface your place mat, in Nando’s they’d rather leave you be.  You could die of hunger in a Nando’s restaurant and it would be be six months before a waiter approached your frozen corpse to politely remind you that dessert can be ordered at the bar.

689,000 people think Nando’s is a restaurant

Nando’s might not care about their customers, but they do care about lesser sentient beings, as evinced by the firm’s Campaign For No Turkey.  A chicken restaurant vowing that it’s doing its bit for turkeys?  That’s as disingenuous as Anders Breivik claiming he was trying to lower the carbon footprint of Norway.

Speaking of psychopaths, Judas-boy insisted that I include this Nando’s video, to counterbalance the scathing review he knew I was penning:

So there you have it: Nando’s marketing agency create kick-ass viral videos.  Sadly, man cannot live on YouTube alone, and thus you’re still going to have to fetch your own cutlery if you want to eat in a Nando’s restaurant.

In fairness to Nando’s, it’s not the style of their food that’s to blame – yeah it’s simple and it’s predictable, but it’s also pretty tasty, I’ll grant them that.  Nor does the problem lie with the source of their food –  so long as it’s succulent, let’s not ask too many questions.  I’m not against Nando’s on ethical grounds.  I’m not trying to save the lives of chickens here – I love those stupid little bastards, defluffed and dunked headfirst in the frier still squawking with rage.  Food needs to be fresh, right?

The crippling problem with Nando’s is not what you’ll find there, but what you won’t: service.  Simple customer service, be it good, bad or indifferent.  It is a fundamentally flawed concept, one that Nando’s the company rather than Nando’s the workforce must carry the can for.  It’s the worst business model in the world.  ‘I’m going to open a restaurant where you pay up front for everything, fill your own drinks, get your own refills, choose your own cutlery and are still expected to pay a service charge.’

Try going on Dragon’s Den with that proposal and you’d get laughed out of the building.  So how did it come to be?  Why is Nando’s spitting out new restaurants like chicken bones and attracting more Facebook followers than a modern-day messiah?

It happened because we allowed it to.  Nando’s came to be in the same way that fascism came to be: because we simply let it.  Creepingly, insidiously, the rise of the Nando’s party has occurred.  When exactly did this nation accept paying over the odds for self-service food before taking their date to the cinema to watch a piss-poor remake and heading home for a perfunctory shag in the missionary position?

Whatever happened to eating at proper restaurants, where the staff actually give a shit, and where the chefs are proper chefs, with gleaming Wusthof knives and raging coke habits?

Whatever happened to eschewing The Three Musketeers and Saw XXI for something less passive?  Less passive than, say, banging your partner on the sofa for ten minutes before pulling out and dumping a toothpaste-squeeze of jism on her belly-button as she stares up at you in a mixture of disgust and disappointment.

If you want to contribute to the breakdown of the moral fabric of society, don’t eat at Nando’s.  There are other, less shameful means of registering your disgust for humanity.  Go kick a puppy about.  Mug an old lady for her Pandrops.  Push a wheelchair down a flight of stairs.  But don’t ever, ever eat at Nando’s.  It’s beyond wrong – it’s a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention.

Let me clarify: if you eat at Nando’s, you are colluding in crimes against humanity.

If Nando’s were a restaurant, it would be a restaurant, but it’s not – sadly it’s just Nando’s.  We deserve better, but we tolerate what we’ve got which is why it’s never gonna get any better.  This is it.  This is Nando’s.  This is your life.

*None of the clauses in this sentence are true.