The Fall of Nando’s Chicken

One of the more frightening examples of South Africa’s decline is to be found in the demise in quality of Nando’s, the ubiquitous chicken franchise whose colourful, omnipresent logo and quirky television commercials have catapulted it into the realm of purporting to be a South African institution, one which has also gained traction outside local borders, feeding chicken peri-peri and other creations to fast-food lovers in 30 countries.

Nando’s once had few keener supporters than myself. Founded in Johannesburg in 1987, Nando’s takeaways bleeped onto my Cape Town radar in the early 1990s, and from the outset I sought out a branch so as to partake in one of life’s great culinary pleasures: namely, peri-peri chicken and chips. And for years — decades — Nando’s did not disappoint.

My standard order of a full chicken, hot peri-peri, nourished me in times of hunger and sustained my soul when things were beating downwards. Arriving home with my brown-bagged chicken, I could not wait to release it from its wrapping, the fragrant wafts of perfectly grilled chook, garlic, peri-peri and lemon drifting through the house. Half the chicken would be plated next to a mound of golden-fried chips, and I would look at the blistered, flame-grilled skin, rivulets of fatty drops running glisteningly over the char, and thank the peri-peri heavens before digging in with a gusto that had my cat staring at me with curious eyes of wonder and concern, and hope for a leftover.

Then, the chicken had structure and texture and, above all, taste. The cooking process had allowed the flesh to remain tender, with an authentically flame-grilled fibrous structure that allowed the bird’s own tasty fat and the peri-peri sauce to find purchase in the depths of the flesh. I’d eat the marble-coloured breast first before removing meat and skin from the wings and legs, alternating the devouring of flesh with a delicious crunchy chip, the potato interior cleansing the palate and preparing it for the next bite of chicken.

Those were the days.

The past two years have, tragically, left me with a hollow, hurtful feeling of nostalgia for those days of pleasure provided by Nando’s, replaced with a set of experiences that can only be described as abominable. Still a keen and eager supporter of establishments doing chicken peri-peri, it pains me to state that Nando’s today offers the worst rendition of this dish to feature on my extensive reference points.

Friday past could only reaffirm this when I hopefully ordered a Nando’s delivery, an order I wished would erase the memories of the horrendous experiences of late that had accrued from the same franchise. It was not to be.

Despite the menu offering a range of diverse chicken dishes ranging from livers to wraps, kebabs and burgers, I stuck to that on which Nando’s reputation was built: namely, a whole peri-peri chicken and chips.

A hint of the downward spiral in quality was the lack of any aroma emanating from the Nando’s-logo-emblazoned brown paper bag, about the only aspect of the franchise that has remained intact. The bag’s contents were emptied into a white casserole dish, and I baulked at the sight, having to pinch myself. Was this the Nando’s I had come to know? What on God’s earth had happened?

The viewing of that thing sliding into the dish was almost as miserable as that of Kallie Kriel’s face during a podcast fighting for the cause of disenfranchised, supposedly genocide-fleeing Afrikaners — just without the facial hair and pursed lips. For here was a thing insulting anybody with the slightest predilection for a simple dish of grilled chicken.

Colour-wise, the butterflied bird had a hue that is almost impossible to describe in its ugliness. Grey comes instantly to mind, but coupled to the grey was a mysterious brownish yellow on the skin, some sort of attempt to present the chicken with a flame-grilled façade.

Now, I am by no means expecting Nando’s to pump out millions of 100% flame-grilled barbecued chickens per day. As a skilled cooker of poultry over open coals, I know the process takes at least an hour, impossible to replicate on a large scale. But in the past, Nando’s par-cooked chickens had been given sufficient time on the flame, allowing for the much-needed imparting of texture and flavour.

The 2025 version of Nando’s whole “flame-grilled” chicken looked like it had been boiled in a basin filled with the post-match shower water from a third-league football team in Bonteheuwel, before being reheated with a sputtering blowtorch.

A bit of prying into the flesh with my trusty Opinel knife and a fork revealed a mass of sogginess, congealed fat converging with a mysterious oiliness that gave the chicken an unhealthy-looking sheen promising to stop a pacemaker at three metres. Once again, the total lack of aroma alerted one to the fact that the meal was to be devoid of flavour and taste, and in this it did not disappoint.

Eating the breast meat was akin to consuming a piece of dense cardboard that had been simmered to a pulp in a pot of water containing a few crumbs of a chicken-stock cube. Slimy, flaccid meat slid from the leg and wing bones without the slightest hint of the comforting flavour one gets from an accurately cooked chicken. The skin, my favourite part, was alarming in its tastelessness, hanging shapelessly from the fork like a pre-Covid autumnal booger.

Unfortunately, the accompanying chips were not able to offer respite from this terrifyingly bad experience. Gone was the carefully deep-fried brittle coating, now replaced by pale potato shreds struggling to defy gravity, uninspiringly hanging from one’s fingers like stale, dead caterpillars. The taste was oily and bland, with an uncalled-for sweetish edge.

Having experienced exactly the same from Nando’s over the past couple of years, I am surprised by my continuing to be startled by the depths to which this once efficient chain of eateries has descended. All that is left is memory and nostalgia. But nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be.