Brent Park (Neasdon) - Ryan Review

Time to go drive back round the North Circular and this gave me a chance to stop in at the infamous Tesco branch! As it's on a Tesco retail park the parking is free and plentiful and Neasden tube station is a 10 minute or so walk away.

I arrived at about 2:30pm with just a few tables in use. Being inside a Tesco I was expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised with a few bits of decor. There is a large heart (made up of lots of little hearts) hanging from the inside Tesco entrance (similar to The O2 hearts) together with plenty of large red chillies hanging down from the very high ceiling. There is also a separate entrance just for Nando's which was like a little greenhouse (as in baking hot inside) as it's all glass, with more hanging chillies in and also etched into the glass. Seeing as though this Nando's uses the full height of the Tesco building it's very bright inside even with the colourful blinds pulled down.

There are four booths down the right side and a larger circular booth at the back of here, with a bench running along opposite, with 8 bright canvas paintings on the wall at the back. There are very large grey metal conical shapes light shades over these booths. Tables and chair sets make up the tables, with about 20 in total. Toilets are the shared customer toilets just on the other side of the restaurant sadly... Nice effort, average overall - but inoffensive.

Ordering the food I was advised it would be "between 16 and 17 minutes"... to which I said, "that's pretty precise" and the chap serving me replied with "between 16 and 17 minutes it will be"... I thought this was some good friendly banter but once the food came in 23 minutes I realised it was probably a language barrier after all...

I had the chicken burger fillet and chips. The chicken fillet was a bit thin and slathered in mayo with no sauce to even speak of. I did ask my earlier banter friend (Bant and Dec) where the sauce was, but then definitely realised there was a language barrier... It was a good size though... maybe just been over-flattened... The chips were a generous portion but fried to within an inch of their life, so were very, very crispy and too hot to eat at first tasting. Some aggressive pounding of the chicken and frying of the chips do take the marks down a little...

This was another one where I still had my cock in my hands at the end - so overall, I think another below average experience... and odd that the best thing about a Nando's inside Tesco was the decor...