'Cheeky' Nando's under fire for apparently coming onto a customer on Twitter

It attempted to slide into her DMs following several winky emoticons

In a bizarre 'brand social media gone wrong' story, Nando's stands accused of flirting with a customer on Twitter.

The purveyor of Portuguese chicken, which initiated the conversation, offered to come to user @ells_' house to make things 'hot'.

"I thought I could handle Nandos hot chicken. But boyyyy the way my mouth was burning," Elle originally tweeted.

She didn't @ the company, but it presumably found the tweet by name-searching, replying "can't handle the heat Elle?" along with a winky emoticon.

"I can handle it, I just chose not to actually," she responded fairly blankly.

Then came the apparent attempt to slide into her DMs.

Nando's has since claimed that it was only offering her "hot sauce" (that old chestnut).

"We like to have fun with our customers on Twitter and reward our loyal fans," a spokesperson told The Telegraph. "We wanted to send Elle a bottle of hot sauce in response to her tweet, which is where the reference to ‘handling the heat’ comes from.

"We would never intentionally offend someone and when we realised we may have done so, deleted the tweet. This is not something we would usually do."

@christophhooton