We also conduct an annual impact assessment through a third-party assessment company. The results have been encouraging. Food security, education, health care, water, energy and housing conditions have all improved for the PERi-Farmers. Stable incomes have meant they can afford education for their children, add rooms to homes, access solar power having been off the grid before and add livestock to their herds. But as we continue to learn and grow, so do the farmers.
All too good to be true? Though it opened in the UK way back in , Nando's still feels like the new kid on the block. It has taken its time to make an impression and we're still excited by it, not bored yet. Still it's no stranger to bad press: the most serious being when one customer was shot by another, in this very Shepherd's Bush branch, in The victim subsequently died.
In Shepherd's Bush, at the counter, I ask the community officers about the shooting. One shrugs. It could have been anywhere.
It's not like the guy was shot for his chicken, was he? Nando's origins lie much further afield than west London: not in Portugal, but in South Africa. The chicken was the best they'd ever tasted, they thought, and promptly bought the joint. They renamed it Nando's, after Fernando, a Portuguese national. Despite its hoo-ha about happy staff and customer service, it's Nando's peri-peri sauce that is its basic selling point. It's a version of the piri-piri marinade used on chicken in Portuguese restaurants the world over, which was created by Portuguese settlers in Africa: they used local chillis Nando's favours chillis from Mozambique , known as pili-pili in Swahili.
One happy online user described the marinades thus: "Turns ordinary, boring, everyday chicken into a Festival of Chicken, complete with chicken-skin streamers and party giblets". They work in documentary photography and have been to Nando's in Africa.
What's the difference? Bryan thinks that the London Nando's are "a little louder, bigger and more open. And a little more uppity [upmarket]. You can count on it being consistently good. Differences do exist. In South Africa, Nando's is seen as more of a takeaway; it wasn't until Nando's in the UK began to emphasise its restaurants over its take-outs that the brand really took off here.
Also, in South Africa, as in Australia, another huge Nando's market, Nando's is marketed as a jokey brand. It does a lot of TV advertising, and its ads are often reprimanded as being in poor taste: a campaign featuring a Spitting Image -style puppet of Julius Malema, president of the ANC youth league, was removed at the behest of Malema's lawyers.
Actually, to my eyes, the ads are dodgy, with black Africans often represented as being stupid or naive. In contrast, in the UK, Nando's has almost no advertising presence at all. I ask Malcolm Pinkerton, a retail analyst at Datamonitor Group, why it hasn't bothered. What's unique about Nando's in the UK, however, is its status with the city youth. They would be, even if they weren't successful.
They are typical Nando's customers, with parents or grandparents born outside the UK who have brought up their offspring to have a spicier palate. Social and confident, happy to hang out with mates, these kids are easy with eating out and expect to be treated well when they do. Nando's ticks all their boxes.
Now, its chicken is the urban youth food of choice and, as if to prove it, I have two quite intense phone conversations about Nando's, with Chipmunk and then Tulisa from N-Dubz. Chipmunk, born in Edmonton, north London and named best hip-hop artist at last year's Mobo awards, tells me he often eats at his local branch of Nando's in Finsbury Park. He favours the wings, medium spicy: "It's the closest thing you can get to jerk chicken, and if chicken isn't Caribbean or Nando's, I can't mess with it.
It's not too booji [bourgeois]. Even though you do get posh people in Nando's, it doesn't outlaw any social class. While researching this piece, I'd heard stories about a Nando's "gold card", awarded to a very small number of extra-special customers and entitling them to free meals. This mythical piece of plastic is so valued, so sought after that, initially, Nando's PR would not confirm its actual existence. As they say in Mozambique, bom proveito.
To remind us of our roots, all our headlines are titled to 87 degrees from North and we love the way this adds a quirky pop of energy to a page. So, we asked Marks Salimu — a South African sign-writer and talented artist to help us out.
Marks hand-painted all our letters and characters onto wooden panels and these were made into our new, refined font. Silhouettes and patterns are big in African design. So when we created our new look, we chose to have a local NGO design and create three beautiful patterns especially for us. Feel free to click on the sections below and explore all the new features.
The idea for the restaurant was conceived in after founders Fernando Duarte and Robert Brozin tried piri-piri chicken for the first time at a Portuguese takeaway in Johannesburg called Chickenland. The restaurant flourished and within two years there were four outlets: three in Johannesburg in South Africa and the other in Portugal. If you want to try proper piri-piri chicken frango assado you can get it just about anywhere in Portugal and especially in the Algarve.
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