Description
Review 2/17/17
I was going to be driving by today so I thought I'd try something else at Spatch; I figured I'd order online and just pick it up on my way home. But their online ordering system requires that you pay in advance, and I didn't want to use my real name. Some other systems (Pei Wei, for one) offer to let you pay at the restaurant when you pick it up. Do I have to pay in advance when I order Chinese food or a Pizza? No. So no update for Spatch.
************************
I went back and looked at some reviews and pictures of Nando's. Nando's also put the little flags on the chicken. Even the logo is similar:
Nando's on the left, Spatch on the right. I can hear the conversation: "Give us something similar, but different enough to not create a copyright violation concern".
I have no problem stealing other people's ideas, if you make them better. I believe in the "Better Mousetrap" theory of evolution. But this isn't better in any way. Nando's has more choices, better sides, better looking food, and the Nando's I've seen "look" like real restaurants, even though they are Quick Serve. I have noticed that the newest Nando's are more fast-foodie (and many have closed), so maybe they're becoming another bad chain restaurant.
Review 2/17/17
Time to taste the chicken.
Enough speculating. Enough waiting for a real review to appear online. I had to taste this stuff for myself.
The newest venture from the group that owns YOLO, Tarpon Bend and S3 is now open. They call this a fast food restaurant; the people who read QSR magazine have learned that with nicer furnishings, they can charge more for the food. Spatch is nicer than the average Fast Food Restaurant.
It's still not a restaurant. The little tables and chairs remind me of Sunday School.
Their website touts the "easy orderding", but you can spend 1/2 hour trying to find all of the choices on the big wall mural menu. Luckily I'd decided what I wanted before I left the condo; 1/4 chicken dark, with medium sauce and a side of mac and cheese. Mac and Cheese is a "premium" side (because elbow macaroni is so bleeping expensive), so there's a $1 upcharge. Fine. The rice and beans looked awful in the picture I saw.
You get a plastic, non-take home cup if you eat in; I headed over to the beverage station to get some iced tea. Fresh lemon is available; they don't have regular iced tea; just green tea and 2 flavors that only people trying to be edgy would want to try. African Rooibus and Pinapple Lychee. I'll bet they don't have to refill those very often.
As with all of the random QSR concepts, you never know how it works. After getting a table, I got back up to get silverware and to check out the sauces, but there's an attendent who said he'd bring it to me. I'm already here, but if you want to feel useful, fine.
The tagline here is "Saucy", because it's all about the sauce. I was about to find out all about it.
They gave me a beeper so I assumed that I had to pick up my food when it was ready. I really dislike Quick Serve.
I ordered my chicken "Medium", which is how I always order chicken wings. Medium usually has some heat but you don't need to keep a gallon of water handy. I asked the attendent dude to bring me some of the Hot Peri Peri sauce. so I could see just how hot it was.
Notice they use the word "inferno". My beeper never went off and the dude brought over my plate in less that 5 minutes.
The first thing that struck me was how small the chicken was; this was from a rotisserie sized chicken (I put the fork on the plate to show how small the chicken is). The pictures I'd seen of the 1/2 chickens were larger; could they have used larger chickens for the opening, or maybe larger chicken for 1/2 chickens than for pieces? I'm guessing the latter. This is a quarter of a 3 lbs chicken which probably cost them $2. I buy 5lb chickens in the supermarket and they're much bigger than this. Page down and you'll see the 5lb quarter I used to test Nando's sauce; look at how much meatier it is than this.
I do like the little flags. Something else that struck me was that this didn't look 'flame broiled". Look at the grill marks; just a couple of weak ones.
When I cut into it I got a better idea of why; the chicken was undercooked. I tasted a piece and while there was a little of the "broiled" taste, I didn't taste any marinade or even much of the sauce. It certainly wasn't hot, or "bursting with flavor" as the fake reviews had all proclaimed.
I poured a bit of the hot sauce on the plate and carefully gave it a try. While the sauce had a pleasant taste, it wasn't hot at all. I tried a bit more, this time taking a bigger swab of the sauce. But alas, the hot sauce has no heat.
The chicken was really a huge disappointment. While I didn't think that it was going to wow me, I did expect it to be good. But this was really bad. I had to put salt and pepper on it, which kind of goes contrary to their claims that the chicken has some magical marinade and a signature sauce. It was also kind of rubbery, which is likely a prep issue. TRP are new to the fast food biz.
The Mac and cheese was fine, just elbows with a cheesey sauce.
Some bread crumbs on top to make it look special Not bad, but not worth $3.50 either.
As the attendent dude was taking away my plate, I said to him "Even the hot sauce isn't hot". He smiled and said "They're trying to fool you". I don't quite know what he meant by that, but he didn't seem surprised by what I said.
The downside of the nicer beverage cup is that you can't take what you didn't finish home with you. I didn't see any take out cups, and I didn't ask for one.
Conclusion
When your headline product is hot sauce and your sauces aren't hot, you have a problem. And when you have 3 different sauces with 3 different levels of heat, your hottest sauce ought to be REALLY hot. None of that is true here.
I'm surprised at how bad the chicken was. While I didn't expect it to be worthy of a 5 star rating, I expected the chicken to be better than something I could whip up in 10 minutes at home. Frankly, I could whiz up some garlic, peppers and lemon juice in a blender and throw it on a rotisserie chicken and it would be light years better than this. And I wouldn't have to worry about the chicken being undercooked.
The Restaurant People baffle me. I know they're stuck with Boulukos, who is a mechanical chef; very good technically but he knows nothing about food; and Petrillo doesn't seem to know much either, but don't any of their investors have taste buds? How can you invest millions in a business based on a specific "hot" pepper and have nobody notice that the resulting product isn't hot?
I wouldn't have predicted that Fork and Balls would close so quickly, because you never know about a bar on Las Olas. But with this food, in this dead shopping center; I'll be very surprised if they don't lose their money on this one. Nobody is switching from Cholula for this stuff.
Today's Spatch-cock News
So for the last 4 days they've been trying to push this South African guy, Stavros Florias, as the "founder". Perhaps TRP is trying to distance themselves from the place? Florias owns a bunch of coffee shops and grab and go places in South Africa, and while the web site is registered to a guy in South Africa, the Trademark for Spatch was registered by The Restaurant People, the business is in Tim Petrillo's name and there's no mention of Florias before 4 days ago. Meanwhile, There is ZERO mention of spatch on Florias' company web site or his linked in profile.
I believe it's just Fake News from TRP, who just can't open a restaurant on the merits of the concept rather than some gimmick. As if some South African guy gives them more credibility or something.
I've also been thinking about Nando's: Nando's opened its first restaurant in 1987, back when hot sauce was pretty much limited to something that went on chicken wings. So the Peri-Peri concept to South Africa was what Buffalo Wings were to the US. But now when a restaurant has buffalo chicken something on the menu, you kind of snicker and realize you're dealing with people who don't have any real ideas.
Past Spatch-cock News
I was just thinking about the name of this place; we made fun of "Fork and Balls", because who would use Balls in the name of a restaurant not located in Wilton Manors? So it's a good thing that they settled on Spatch and left off the rest ....
They put up a website today; not sure why waiting for opening day is a good strategy in today's world, but more info is now available. They've started on the wrong foot by marketing their main product in a way that the FDA doesn't allow:
The FDA Specificially does not allow marketing Chicken as Hormone Free, because all poulty have naturally occuring hormones:
Initially labeling such as "No Hormones Added" was permitted, but since then the laws have changed. It is now illegal to add hormones to chicken, so any claim of "no added hormones" is misleading, since it is illegal to do so. Claims of "Natural" must also include an explanation of what natural means:
So here we have another over-zealous marketing campaign engineered by people who don't understand food marketing basics. My view is "Why Lie?". Nobody really cares, and the dopey people who believe that "natural" chicken is worth more can be bamboozled easily using legal marketing.
Also of interest is that the chilis that appear in the pictures on their website don't look like bird's eye chilies! Bird's eye, the chilies used in Peri-Peri sauce, are long and thin with a thick stem and cap. They're also very small; not nearly as big as a chicken leg. So unless they're very tiny chickens, the ones in the photos look like more like fresnos or ripe jalapeos.
********
It appears that this place is ready to open, but the marketing challenged Restaurant People haven't provided much info on what they're doing, aside from giving away free food during their grand opening. They have no web site or menu available, so 2 days before opening we have NOTHING but speculation. So far this is what I can cobble together from the bits of info their clunky PR people have leaked.
1) The "restaurant" is indeed a Nando's Clone; the concept revolves around sauces made with South African Birds-eye Chiles
2) The "restaurant" has a take out counter, hoping that people will buy pre-cooked chickens here instead of next door at Fresh Market
3) Sauces are available for sale.
When I first heard about this "concept" I picked up the full gamut of Nando's sauces to see what all of the commotion was about.
I initially tasted all of them on some grilled chicken without marinating them. The Garlic is disgusting. Some garlic powder on the chicken would be better. The other 3 sauces are about the same. None of them were particularly good, when comparing them to other hot sauces I've had.
I tried it several different ways. I tried saucing the chicken while it was on the grill. I tried marinating for a couple of hours and also marinating overnight. Frankly there wasn't much difference.
Now chicken always tastes better when it's flame broiled, but there are no flames allowed in the condo. But my opinon on Nando's sauces were that they aren't that good. There's nothing magical about the Peri-Peri chili. It's certainly not automatic goodness.
I also tried to make my own sauce, using scotch bonnet peppers and some citrus and spices. My sauce was FAR superior to Nando's. I just whizzed up some scotch bonnets, lemon juice, garlic, vinegar and some spices in a food processor and it was a much better taste than Nando's junk.
Now Im sure the bottled sauces aren't exactly the same as the sauce used in their restaurants, and they have some secret way of marinating them (that I'm sure SPATCH won't be able to reproduce), so the restaurant food is probably much better than what you can do just slapping some of their sauce on your chicken.
Now maybe the talented "Restaurant People" have come up with some unbelievable recipe, and maybe cooking the chickens in a professional flame broiler will be far superior than what I can do at home.
Here's the problem with this idea: Hot sauce on chicken is nothing new. The idea that the Peri-Peri peppers are so good that people will dump their favorite hot sauce (think Frank's, Srirachi or my favorite, Texas Pete's) to buy something created by the YOLO guys is a big stretch. Secondly, I don't think this stuff is as good as buffalo sauce (which is basically hot sauce and butter).
If they've come up with some recipe that's better than the 1000s of hot sauces available, good for them. But if you can't duplicate the restaurant quality product at home, then why would I buy THEIR sauce instead of another that I like?
Previous Rantings
Tim Petrillo and the Restaurant People are getting into the Chicken game; SPATCH will feature Peri-Peri chicken; a Portuguese grilled chicken preparation spiced with South African Bird's Eye Chiles (PERi-PERi). Peri-Peri (also Piri-Piri) have a Scoville heat index of 100,000. A Jalapeno pepper is 10,000.
My bet is this is a rip-off of Nando's, a Peri-Peri chicken chain with stores around DC and Chicago. What's ironic is that their restaurants sort of look like YOLO.
Notice the amateur photographer who caught himself taking the picture in the mirror. Crap like that happens sometimes unwittingly, but you photoshop it out after the fact.
Their last venue Fork and Balls attempted to rip-off the Meatball Shop, except the food wasn't nearly as good. Let's see if Boulukos can come up with a recipe that doesn't suck.
My view of restaurant names is that a clever name that has to be explained to people isn't a very clever name. The first Google hit on Spatch is the Urban Dictionary refers to female pubic hair. I think they're going for Spatchcock, which is a technique for split grilling a chicken.
This will be Petrillo's first attempt to try to get people into a restaurant for the food; the question is will people come in for a $13 half chicken when they can get a whole rotisserie chicken next door at Fresh Market for $7.
You can pick up Nando's sauces at Publix if you can't wait.
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getUser() on null in /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php:267 Stack trace: #0 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(75): threadedComments->formatComment(Object(stdClass)) #1 /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php(100): threadedComments->printParent(Array) #2 /usr/local/www/insideftl/comments.php(74): threadedComments->printComments(Array) #3 /usr/local/www/insideftl/single-post.php(208): require_once('/usr/local/www/...') #4 /usr/local/www/insideftl/post.php(22): include('/usr/local/www/...') #5 /usr/local/www/insideftl/index.php(172): include('/usr/local/www/...') #6 {main} thrown in /usr/local/www/classes/comments-class.php on line 267