Six of us ate in Nando's a cheap end of the market chicken shack. You pay up front, fetch your own plates, sauces, drinks so staff contact is mostly at dirty plate clearing. Nando's beats KFC hands down on any test except fat content. This one served halal meat. Unlike KFC its also good value for money: a whole cooked chicken, 2 sides + unlimited fizzless soft drinks is £20 for 2 people (their coffees are far to expensive). The tiny sweet potato mash portion is moreish & devine. The chips & corn cob (with butter) are just ok and industrially made. The chemically water injected chicken was small, unsurprisingly moist & perfectly cooked. It's important to me to know my food. Nando's chief fame claim is the African bird's eye chili, a cultivar of capsicum frutescens, one of the sources of chilli pepper. It grows both domestically & wild. Also known as peri peri it's a small member of the capsicum genus. It grows in Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, troubled South Sudan's tropical forests and the southern half of Ethiopia. The Portuguese brought it to Goa. A perfect peri peri climate. Piri piri sauce is Portuguese in origin (used as a seasoning or marinade) and is especially prevalent in Angola, Namibia, Mozambique & South Africa. It is made from crushed chillies, onion, garlic, pepper, salt, citrus peel, lemon juice, bay leaves, paprika, pimiento, basil, oregano & tarragon. The chilli can hit 175,000 on Wilbur Scoville's heat scale similar to scotch bonnet. If you find it hot please avoid the 2nd hottest chilli on earth, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion; at 2 million on the scale. The hottest is now the Carolina Reaper. It's an evil looking, gnarled, oily lumpy pod with a sucked-up belly and a small tail reminiscent of wasp's sting that screams 'don't eat me'. It's 100 times hotter than a jalapeño looks like a scotch bonnet and when ripe it's a luscious Crayola red, 2.2 million on the scale and developed by farmer Ed Currie. It'll make him a millionaire. Currie's family has a history of heart disease & cancer. He decided in college to find a way to avoid that fate. He began to research which populations had the lowest rates of those diseases. He found they had several things in common, but what stuck him was that they all ate hot chillies with every meal. So he started growing peppers for cancer research. It was by trying to grow a sweet pepper as chemotherapy patients often lose ability to taste anything but sweet that he accidentally created the world's hottest. Currie hoped that patients could still taste a sweet pepper. They could. He knew he had something special as soon as he laid eyes on the Reaper, it was the first pepper he'd even seen with a sting. Bite the tiniest bit and you will hiccup, cough, and feel the pepper rip through your oesophagus, you'll know exactly where it is every second as if it has a GPS device on it. Currie sells Carolina Reaper seeds & hot sauces, called "I Dare You Stupit" & "Purgatory sauce," on his PuckerButt Pepper website. Only 20 years ago the Red Savina Habanero, then the world's hottest pepper, only topped around half a million Scoville heat units. Then the Indian Bhut Jolokia, the first superhot pepper, was discovered by researchers, better known as the Ghost Pepper, the Bhut Jolokia more than doubled the Red Savina's Scoville rating, and all this from my first and likely my last visit to a Nando's. read more