Nando's Victoria - Cardinal Place — Restaurant in London

Nando's are renowned across the UK for kind, courteous staff, excellent venues and ostensibly pricing chicken per gram more than gold. This venue by Victoria station in London lives by the same Nando's script. That's not to say it's bad. Far from it. In fact the venue is rather nice. It bustles along, people come and go and no one bats an eyelid that chicken here is more expensive than venison. Cheeky Nando's. You can't write a review without saying "Cheeky Nando's" can you. It's practically law. The staff were great here. The wind was blowing a proper hooley and the door was being held closed by the foot of a well dressed, slightly camp young man on the inside who, after I bumped my head on the glass door trying to rush in was looking strangely at me with friendly bemusement. They were quite busy and he politely turned away a couple who followed us in, disappeared briefly leaving me holding the door shut my my foot (for a wee maybe? I didn't ask.), and then returned to usher us to a nearby table. Ordering was a bit chaotic. It's all done via an app on your phone now but we didn't know that until we'd managed to stare down a passing service attendant who were all very well trained in stubbornly refusing to make eye contact. She explained without a hint of condescension and in old person, mono-syllabic language that we needed to use our phones. After a very short while our drinks arrived, followed momentarily by our food. We'd ordered the sharing platter and actually it was rather good! We ate everything, as you'd expect - since what we were actually paying for was a Marco Pierre-White three course meal with fine wine. Followed by a cheese board. And port. By the time we were done we'd left nothing but bones and some of the pattern was still left on the plates. Summary: Really nice establishment, great staff and the chicken was chicken. OK, it was really good chicken too. I'll go again if I'm round that way (and have won the lottery the week before). Joking aside, if you like Nando's and everything it has to offer you can't go wrong, it lives up to the franchise...

When placing our order at the till this evening around 19:15 I was served by a girl who was horribly rude. I asked for my mains stating the ‘heat’ before the name of the dish, and as I continued she cut me off rudely with ‘what heat’ - so she obviously wasn’t listening. This was frustrating as it happened a few times as I was ordering for the whole table. Then as I was asking for the Fino Pitta she cut me off again and said there was no caramelised onions. I asked if there was anything she would recommend instead and again before finishing my sentence she said ‘no’ so abruptly and rudely. As I was contemplating she was tapping her fingers on the till impatiently, which is again very rude. Then I asked if I could have chilli jam in replacement and she said ‘no’ in a tone like I had annoyed her. So I ordered this as a separate side. I appreciate that sometimes kitchens run out of things but was honestly shocked at the way I was spoken to - it was just unnecessarily rude? It could have been handled in a much better way and did not represent any sort of customer service and establishment should be proud of. They also had no forks for about 30 minutes and ran out of Fanta - again, understandable but everything just contributed to my feelings of frustration due to the experience with this girl. To make matters worse, my Fino Pitta tasted very much of fish - I’m not sure how or why but the sauce was honestly horrible and I couldn’t finish my meal. I was so fed up because of the service I had previously received that I didn’t even bother speaking to anyone about it. Not a good experience Nando’s. I honestly just wanted to get up and leave as soon as I got in there. This feedback focusses on customer service and your Fino Pitta - both of which I feel needs to be explored as have made a customer very unhappy. I most certainly will not be...

Came for dinner with a group of friends, from the moment we requested for a table the staff weren’t keen to sit us down despite us being within opening times, seemed like they were in a rush to close or not happy to serve us. It took three staff members to speak between each other to decide whether we could come in, we eventually got seated, ordered and the wait time for food was reasonable. Two of my friends ordered the same order, a quarter chicken with sides yet when it came to the table one was a normal good sized meal, the other however was unacceptable. The smallest amount of chips and the worst part was the chicken leg, definitely not worth the money we paid for it. We kindly requested to change the piece of chicken for a bigger one, only for the supervisor on shift, ELSA, to give us attitude and sarcasm, telling us that a chicken has two breasts and two legs, as if we don’t know that already? Instead of hearing us out or try to come to a solution she thought it was excellent customer service to talk over us, still repeating the parts of a chicken, then walked away while shrugging her shoulders. It gets better, when another meal arrived, there was hair on the food, requesting to change it was smoother only because another waiter assisted us but we still heard the supervisor frustrated say to her to just bring the food over. Overall a very unpleasant experience due to this one staff member, I work within the hospitality industry aswell, i can understand you want to go home or have a rough day but it’s not fair to have a go or treat customers in the way Elsa did with us. Won’t be...