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With quality food, friendly staff, quick service and excellent value for money, Nando's is a great place to eat. Don't expect identikit, pre-fab restaurant interiors which are usually a staple of the larger chains; each restaurant is tailored to its local surroundings and customers, offering up a unique restaurant experience to go with the equally unique taste of legendary, Portuguese, Peri-Peri chicken.

Your peri-peri chicken, when the chips are down so to speak, is a fresh A grade chicken that has never seen the inside of a freezer, but having made the supreme sacrifice is butterfly-cut, marinated for 24 hours in a secret brew called - you've guessed - peri-peri, and is then cooked to your choice over an open flame.

There are, of course, many variations on this broad theme, numerous plays on words such as Nando's experi-perience, peri-peri good reasons why you should eat at a Nando's, and all one hopes is that for their sake chicken never goes out of fashion. New Nando's are opening all the time, peri-peri quickly in fact, the spicy bastes become hotter and more daring, and the full platter offers a whole chicken, large chips or spicy rice and Nando's salad or coleslaw.

Since chickens are vegetarian it seems logical you can order veggie or bean burgers and patties, and still feel the heat from the peppers. All in all, Nando's is hotly recommended for those occasions when you have a large following of permanently hungry children, or adults even, to keep happy - the only thing taken really seriously is the quality of those peri-peri good chickens

Nando's is a place for bright people who love to laugh and love to eat, and is guaranteed to spice up your taste buds. Their fun approach to life means that when you visit Nando's you can fully relax without the airs and graces associated with more starchy dining out.

For the location of your nearest Nando's restaurant and a host of details about menus, parties and drinks, a click on their Website will reveal a Pandora's box of information.

As pitches come you cannot do much better than this. Exciting new venues demand a supporting cast of similar status, and bang opposite the front door of the new Wembley Stadium is as good a place as any.

So much for the location, what about the restaurant? Everything you would expect and more seems to be the best answer. All glass, steel and gleaming surfaces, Alisan, named after a mountain in Taiwan, offers a cuisine that is both ageless and yet so very contemporary, with wonderful dim sum and Cantonese influences that bring the appetite to life. Dim sum is served throughout the day until 5pm and a split level restaurant on the ground floor has space for 180 covers.

The beauty of dim sum of course is that you can go on in easy stages over as long as you want, just the same as tapas, and the choices are incredibly wide. On the fried dim sum alone there are over 14 choices and that's before you even consider the steamed, bakes, grilled and Cheung fun varieties.

And talking of fun, I've always felt that was what dim sum is all about - sociability, easy, healthy eating, and a mind-blowing range of dishes. Set menus are there to take the pain out of ordering, and they are unbelievably good, as well as generous. Pre-event menus cater for those who want to set themselves before going on to enjoy a game or concert in the massive new Stadium, finished at last and well worth waiting for.

 Mesopotamia is a Babylonian treat, from the processional lions along the rough plaster walls to the bright blue and gold replica of the Ishtar Gate at the back of the restaurant. If you're lucky, you could catch a table with its views of the arch of Wembley Stadium.

Under the intimacy of the tented ceiling, this relaxed, family-friendly restaurant serves delicious Iraqi cuisine, with dishes such as chicken fesanjun, in walnut and pomegranate sauce and shoulder of lamb slow-cooked with dried apricot, prunes and spices. And there are dishes typical of Lebanese cuisine, like the houmous and tabouleh.

The Babylon Tower, this time made of chocolate stands proudly on their dessert list. The restaurant's great neighbourhood venue helps locals and concertgoers in Wembley.

Sakonis brings the effervescent delights of Indian vegetarian cuisine to their locations in Harrow and Wembley, and in the process they have happily introduced numerous ravenous carnivores to the charms of paneer pakoda and aloo chat. It's a feast for the entire family and their versatile menu brings different gastronomic landscapes together, where you will be surprised to see how well Chinese cuisine blends with Indian to produce a fusion that is loved fervently across the subcontinent.

There's a wide choice of eats and bites, traditional snacks such as idli, bhajias, masala dosas, cutlets and naan breads, alongside the more pungent pani puri and dahi wada, lentil fritters in spiced yoghurt. Indian street food would be incomplete without the delicious paneer chilli and the ubiquitious gobi manchurian and those longing for a taste of the food back home will love to indulge. Fresh fruit juices, coffee, tea and hot chocolate are some of the beverages that accompany your meal.

Gana is a friendly little Sri Lankan café on the busy Ealing Road. The place is well known amongst the local population for cooking up good quality traditional Sri Lankan dishes in a relaxed atmosphere. Workers often pop by for a set lunch with dishes priced at just £3.95, making for a far more satisfying lunch than just a sandwich for not much more money. Evenings are a very laidback affair with dishes such as fish curries and what's known as string hoppers, a type of rice flour pancake. Not the kind of place to impress a date but it does act as an ideal stop off point to fill up before a night out or to grab a quick and inexpensive bite to eat on your way home.

Reviewed by Linda Buttle