Nala Not Just Noodles, Whiteladies Road: 'The teriyaki pork almost lived up to their ludicrous claims'
If AI made a restaurant, this is what it would look like
It’s been two years since AI chatbots launched into the mainstream and sent the world into a frenzy. As soon as ChatGPT became free to use, columnists and critics started penning articles about how it would never replace bona fide journos, AI-generated websites started multiplying like Hydra’s heads and universities scrambled to work out how to spot when students had written an entire dissertation overnight. Suddenly, copy and ideas that would have taken days to imagine could be assembled in minutes.
But AI still has a long way to go. The language models lean heavily on hyperbole and are prone to ‘hallucinating’ - making stuff up. It is still relatively easy to spot when AI has been used - be it in pieces of text or, my personal favourite - images featuring suspicious numbers of fingers. It was this that was our first impression of new Whiteladies Road joint Nala ‘Not Just Noodles’.
Nala’s self-aggrandising social media posts welcome customers to its ‘culinary world’ and/or ‘sensory journey’ to ‘embark your flavorful adventure’ (sic). After all, ‘this is not just a restaurant, but a vibrant and innovative food space’.
But before we get into the nitty gritty, a question for you. Is one hundred:
a) the number of noodle restaurants in Bristol
b) the number of days since Nala opened in Whiteladies Road or
c) Nala’s impressive number of positive Google reviews?
If you answered all of the above, congratulations, you’ve earned +10 Sauce points*.
Nala has a fair amount of competition. There are chefs taking great pains to recreate exact local experiences transported thousands of miles west to a Stokes Croft backstreet, there are noodles being expertly hand-flung in a brightly-lit kitchen in Redcliffe, and all manner of delicious dishes in between. Bristol has some truly phenomenal noodles.
In the hundred days that they’ve been open, Nala have managed to invite at least seven influencers to give them rave reviews on Instagram, not to mention the suspiciously high number of glowing Google reviews. Their current Google rating is 4.9, which is higher than the now Michelin-starred restaurant Wilsons. Many of these ‘reviewers’ have never reviewed anywhere else on Google, just Nala.
Yet, despite such bold claims and lauding of ‘perfect noodles’, ‘authentic recipes’ and ‘unreal flavours’ Nala achieves… none of the above. Such artificial sounding claims as these are hard to put out of your head entirely, but I kept an open mind as I perused the menu of ‘endless satisfaction’, and sat back in my squishy orange chair, munching on complimentary smashed cucumber, as I waited for my ‘feast of senses adventure’ to begin. A wait of all of six minutes.
Our five dishes were buoyantly brought out by a smiling waiter, but any cheerfulness ended there. From first chew of lukewarm chicken, my modest hope of seeing any of the ‘dedication to quality’ I was promised began to shrink.
I’ll start with the good, because there is some. The beef shin noodle soup (£15) was a moreish broth with rich, fatty meat, and the savoury pork noodles (£12) came with tasty crispy fried teriyaki-style pork of a calibre that could almost live up to their ludicrous claims.
Basil tofu with pork mince (£9) was an odd dish that smacked of under-seasoned lasagne and had a generic sweet flavour that went nowhere interesting. Save the three slithers of chilli pepper sat atop the mince, there was nothing fiery (as per the menu) about it – least of all the temperature, which started tepid and only grew colder as it lingered, unwanted, on the table.
Nala’s satay chicken skewers (£9) sooner reminded me of the plastic-covered fridge section of Tesco’s meal deals than the vibrant flavours of South East Asia. A minute more in the microwave would have gone down a treat. The adequately crunchy ‘heartburst’ spring roll (£3.50) was, other than being served hotter than the sun (at last!), nothing to Bluesky home about.
I love simple food done well (see Nice Spice on Denmark Street for reference) and Nala could do with leaning more into simplicity rather than busying itself with overblown marketing copy.
Nala’s penchant for calling itself ‘innovative’ is certainly a novel use of the word, given I wouldn’t know the interiors or menu from any of your standard Asian fusion chains. And its 100+ positive Google reviews practically tripping over their own sycophancy to praise, curiously, the ‘freshly handmade noodles’ or ‘cosy friendly vibe’ aren’t helping the restaurant’s case for authenticity. How a breezy, spotlit restaurant can be called cosy is beyond me. And how any of it can be called authentic, as it so frequently is in the ‘reviews’, when few dishes even reference where in South East Asia they are supposedly from is another story entirely. It seems authenticity, along with innovative, vibrant, perfect and harmoniously, is just another word that has been plucked from an online thesaurus.
It’s been years since TripAdvisor has been considered genuinely useful, and recently there has been a new slew of articles, including this one in the BBC, calling out the often completely unfounded praise of influencers. But now it seems that Google, too, has fallen prey to such falsities. It is genuinely very difficult to establish whether a restaurant is half decent amidst so much untrustworthy and paid for ‘content’.
Here’s hoping Nala can carve out its own niche and appeal to more than just oblivious passers-by in time. Perhaps ChatGPT could write them a new menu?
All words and photos by Caitlin Johnson-Bowring
Nala Not Just Noodles, Clifton Down Shopping Centre, Whiteladies Road, BS8 2NN
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A really fantastic read and touched on a lot of things close to my heart, especially recently. Shame about dinner. But the mention of the BBC piece, the *cough* questionable “reviews” on Google Maps and the “influencer” feedback.