Output Stream of Consciousness

We first encountered Nando's, strangely, in Nairobi. It was at the gas station near the Indaba campsite, with a grocery store and a pizza place. We didn't have the chicken there, but we did have some of their sauces with the pizza we ordered from another counter, courtesy of other folks who were on safari with us who did have the chicken.

We come back, and hardly a month later saw signs for a Nando's coming here, being built on 32nd Ave.

It's been a long wait, and their timing was a bit poor in terms of trying to get staff - everyone is looking for workers, but it finally opened some time over the past few days. So we dropped in on our way back from Staples (picking up more card game supplies)...

It's a little bit confusing up at the front - there's not much signage telling you how things work. It's a little bit older way of doing things - you order at the front and then go sit down, red wood block-on-a-stick in hand.

We had their variety pack for two, which consisted of two sides and three kinds of chicken. Salads for the sides were about 50 cents extra.

The "peri fries" were not terribly exciting. Just fries with seasoning on top, albeit good seasoning. The caesar salad on the side was fresh and quite tasty.

The three kinds of chicken we had were chicken wings, which came on two skewers, four to a skewer, a half chicken, which was very tasty, and unlike Swiss Chalet, conveniently cut up into pieces, and kebabs of roasted chicken breast. The grilling treatment they are subjected to was nice - the chicken was all tasty and still moist - and what made it even nicer were the sauces.

Their peri-peri (a kind of pepper) sauces are just plain tasty, in particular the garlic one. One thing I must say, though, is that compared to the spice level at the Nairobi outlet, the heat level of the spices were tame. Even the hot peri-peri sauce just started to become a tiny bit hot, nothing like the nose-clearing level of even the garlic peri-peri sauce in Nairobi (I did find that odd in Nairobi, though - East African food is extremely mild on the whole)

Good food, about $32 for the both of us, smelled great.

Disappointments (all pretty mild): they don't actually seem to sell those sauces in the same size of bottle as they have at the tables. Could have used more instructional labelling near the front. Didn't know whether soft drink refills were free. Nice ambience, but the ordering-up-front part takes away from it a little bit.

Yum :)