Nando's Garlic Bread Copycat Recipe
A baguette, a compound butter with peri-peri in it, twelve minutes in the oven. About twenty pence a portion.
Cooking Nando's at home, and what its menu costs
A marinade, a baste and a bird butterflied flat - the most reproducible chain menu in Britain.
AI-generated editorial illustration created for food.fast; not a product photograph from Nando's.
The Nando's recipes on this site
Not every menu item has a recipe here, and that is deliberate - We write a page when there is something genuinely worth saying about how to make the thing.
Nando's Macho Peas Copycat Recipe
Crushed rather than mashed, with fresh mint and a lot of chilli. The cheapest side on this site and one of the best.
Nando's Peri-Peri Chicken Copycat Recipe
A whole chicken opened flat, a day in the marinade, and a baste that only goes on in the last five minutes because it…
Nando's Peri-Peri Sauce Copycat Recipe
The marinade, the baste and the table sauce, from one blender jug. Lemon-led before it is hot, which is the thing mos…
Nando's Perinaise Copycat Recipe
Peri-peri sauce folded into mayonnaise. The ratio is the entire recipe and most people get it wrong in the same direction.
Nando's Spicy Rice Copycat Recipe
Yellow, studded with peppers, and barely hot. Twenty-five minutes and about thirty pence a portion.
What Nando's food actually tastes of
Peri-peri is lemon-forward before it is hot. Whole lemon - peel, pith and all, blitzed - plus red wine vinegar, garlic, paprika and oil. The chilli sits behind the acid. A copy that tastes only of heat has too little lemon.
The marinade and the baste are the same sauce at different thicknesses. Marinate in the thin version, baste with the version that has been reduced and had a little more oil beaten in.
The char comes from sugar in the baste. A spoon of honey or brown sugar in the basting sauce is what gives the blackened edges. Add it only in the last few minutes or it burns before the chicken is done.
About Nando's
Nando's is, structurally, the easiest major chain to reproduce at home, because there is very little between you and the food. A chicken is butterflied, marinated in a peri-peri mixture for a day, and grilled hard while being basted. There is no fryer, no proprietary par-cook, no frozen step. Everything that makes it taste the way it does is a sauce you can make in a blender.
The African bird's eye chilli (piri piri) is the one ingredient people struggle to find outside South Africa and Portugal. Thai bird's eye chillies are a genuinely close substitute - slightly less fruity, comparably hot - and the recipes here say how to adjust for them rather than pretending the original is the only option.
The sides are the underrated half of the menu. Macho peas, spicy rice and the garlic bread are all trivially easy, cost almost nothing, and are the difference between "chicken" and "Nando's".
What Nando's charges, from the menu we hold
21 priced options across 81 menu sections, as last recorded in United States. Prices move and vary by outlet, so treat these as a reference point rather than a quote.
Half the menu sits between $4.79 and $11.69. Here is the whole spread:
| Position | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest priced item | $3.69 | |
| Middle of the menu | $8.19 | |
| Dearest priced item | $46.99 |
Nando's changes its prices without telling you. We read this menu once a month and keep the reading – have the changes emailed to you, free, one click to stop.
Every reading we hold is on the Nando's price history. The full list is on the Nando's menu page, and the 6 items we have rebuilt at home are listed here.
What Nando's charges in 7 countries
The same item, priced from each country’s own menu and converted to one currency so the columns can be read against each other. Nando's sets prices per market, so a gap here is the chain’s pricing rather than an exchange rate artefact – and the widest gap on this list is 1/4 Chicken, which costs $13.90 in the dearest market and $5.60 in the cheapest.
| Item | 🇬🇧 GBP | 🇦🇺 AUD | 🇮🇪 EUR | 🇳🇿 NZD | 🇸🇬 SGD | 🇭🇰 HKD | 🇲🇾 MYR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $7.28 | — | $13.45 | — | $13.90 | $8.79 | $5.60 | |
| $4.96 | $4.15 | — | $3.34 | $4.53 | $4.46 | — |
Only items Nando's prices in at least 5 of the markets we hold are listed, because a row with three figures in it is a gap rather than a comparison.
What Nando's sells nearly everywhere
Ranked by how many of the markets in our price data carry the item with a published price. This is computed from the menu tables, so it reflects what the chain actually sells rather than what it advertises.
| Menu item | Markets priced | Recipe |
|---|---|---|
| Coleslaw | 5 | - |
| 1/4 Chicken | 5 | - |
| Naughty Nata | 4 | - |
| Whole Chicken | 4 | Nando's Peri-Peri Chicken Copycat Recipe |
| 1/2 Chicken | 4 | - |
| Mediterranean Salad | 3 | - |
| Garlic Bread | 3 | Nando's Garlic Bread Copycat Recipe |
| Corn on the Cob | 3 | - |
| PERi-PERi Chips | 3 | - |
| PERi-PERi Nuts | 3 | - |
| Spicy Rice | 3 | Nando's Spicy Rice Copycat Recipe |
| Chips | 3 | - |
Build your Nando's order, see what it costs
Tick what you would actually order. The total runs as you go, and where we have built the item at home you will see both figures side by side.
Other chicken chains
What else people compare Nando's against, and what we hold for each.
Nando's is a trademark of its owner. food.fast is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Nando's. Recipes on this page are our own interpretations, not the company’s formulas.