Dining Out: Battle of the spicy chicken

I’ve been from Gloucester to Vanier to Lowertown to Hull to Nepean, visiting fast, casual restaurants that serve their variations on a dish that has its roots in the former Portuguese colonies of East Africa. There, and elsewhere on the continent, they grow African bird’s eye chilies, known in Swahili as piri-piri peppers. Grill some chicken, preferably marinated, and season it liberally piri-piri-style, and you have piri-piri chicken.

In my Ottawa-Hull travels, I discovered four very different interpretations of the dish. (I could also have tried the piri piri fish at Palki, an Indian restaurant on Ogilvie Road, since the Portuguese brought the pepper to Goa on India’s West Coast, but I digress.)

In Hull, there’s Galo Piri Piri, in the shadow of Les Terrasses de la Chaudière, a Portuguese fast-food restaurant, down to the fruity Sumol soft drinks available by the cash. Service here is cafeteria-style, with customers queuing to place orders with staff at an open kitchen. At the back of the kitchen, butterflied chickens spin over the charcoal grill.

The chicken ($14.49 for a half-chicken dinner) I tried twice here has been moist enough, but only slightly smoky. The medium-strength, strikingly red piri piri sauce that was painted on the bird once it came off the grill struck me and a companion as very salty and harshly sour. There’s a bottled piri piri sauce on the tables, and I wonder if I’d prefer the chicken without the paint job, but sauced with the bottled stuff, which I was told wasn’t the same formulation.

Piri piri chicken at Galo Piri Piri in Hull.

Piri piri chicken’s also on the menu at Laziz Broast & Mix Grill, an Afghan fast-food place in an Innes Road strip mall. In addition to the indigenous beef and chicken kebabs, Laziz also serves pressure-fried chicken, chicken fajitas and piri piri chicken — it’s a wide world of poultry, if you will.

I tried just the piri piri chicken, ordered “medium.”  Of the half-chicken ($13.50, with rice and salad), grilled over gas, the dark quarter was moist but the white meat was dry. More seasoned than sauced, the chicken was sour but closer to mellow than punchy. Some extra hot sauce was joltingly sharp. Sumac-dusted rice and salad, which I expect on Afghan dishes, completed the platter.

Piri Piri chicken at Laziz Broast and Grill on Innes Road.

Usually I don’t review chains and franchises, but I did try the more westerly of Ottawa’s two Nando’s Flame-Grilled Chicken outposts, where the spicy, gas-grilled specialty is dubbed “peri peri chicken.” Given that Nando’s, begun in 1987 by Mozambicans in South Africa, has popularized peri peri chicken at about 1,000 outlets in 30 countries, it’s arguably the global standard for the dish — which is not to say it’s the best.

To the sound of Afro pop, across from the wall where many bottles of branded hot sauce were on display, I dug into the gas-grilled, medium-spicy chicken ($9.65 for a leg with fries). The dark meat was moist, (Some Nando’s white meat tried later at home was less so) and the slathered light orange sauce had some character, but was as sour as it was hot. A peek at the ingredients’ list on a bottle showed that after water, vinegar, lemon juice and onion were leading ingredients.