ASK

By the time you read this review, this restaurant will probably be closed.
I was looking for a place to have a quick supper with my sister before going off to a show. It seemed convenient and I love ASK generally. I had been to this restaurant before, years earlier and remembered it well.
It’s in the middle of a whole row of Italian restaurants such as Pizza Express and Bella Pasta, that are being knocked down in 5 days time! It seems a shame as the building is beautiful and the detail and decoration inside are really pretty.
We sat in the window and ordered from the seriously over-​stretched waitress. The tables were so close together that I had to lean to the left every few minutes so that the waitress could get between the tables to serve. That was spectacularly annoying.
We ordered the Autumn special pasta — linguine in spicy tomato sauce with aubergines and crispy pancetta. We were 100% disappointed. There was a picture of the dish on an advert on the table, which looked delicious — our dishes bore no resemblance… It was also probably one of the most expensive pasta dishes I have ever eaten at almost 11 quid! It was greasy, the pancetta was not in any way crispy, it was instead fatty and flaccid. The aubergines were tasteless and the pasta was overcooked. The sauce was not spicy — there was simply half a chilli dumped in it somewhere, and although the picture showed fresh basil temptingly draped on top, we had no leaves in sight.
It was edible, but only because we were very hungry indeed! It was more like a pasta dish that you throw together in college before going out to drink a lot.
When the manager came over to ask if everything was ok, I gave him the feedback. He listened carefully, apologised, explained that they were running with temporary staff and took one of the pastas off of the bill.
I appreciated his attitude and was mollified. :-)
This place gets three stars because it is pretty, the manager was brilliant and it was actually fairly painless.

ASK is probably my least favourite of the chain Italian restaurants: I find their pizzas to be okay but uninspiring, particularly as unlike Zizzis or Pizza Express they don’t offer the option of a thinner base for their pizzas. Further, service can be a bit so-​so. But this ASK has a major redeeming feature, namely a spacious and rather stylish building which appears to have been a theatre in a previous life. As a chain they also deserve credit for having the boldness to include on their menu a pizza scorned by pizza snobs — the ham and pineapple ‘tropicana’. So while not quite class-​leading, an Italian restaurant not without its charms. A-​OK in other words.

Gemütliches Restaurant mit sehr freundlicher Bedienung. Die Pizza ist hervorragend! Als Nachtisch hatten wir Käsekuchen — den ich definitiv schon mal besser gegessen habe — und Profiterol (sehr sehr sehr lecker!!!). Preislich vollkommen i.O. Für 2 Personen (inkl. Vorspeise und Getränken): 40 £.