ASK Italian

Not bad! I wouldn’t go bad though.
I’m giving this place 3 stars because the service is outstanding. The staff are very nice and the atmosphere is welcoming.
Price wise, I would say it’s affordable. However, the food is not great. In fact, that’s my second time here and I only came back because i wanted to give this place a second chance.
The menu is quiet limited, the food options aren’t that appealing. You got your pizzas, calzones, risottos and literally 3 main salads.
I had the chicken milanese, wasn’t impressed at all.
I wouldn’t waste my time or money here again. Perhaps for coffee only.

Nice place! It seems quite new, modern and maybe a bit cheap… But the food was really tasty and the atmosphere was good!
When you walk in you can see a big open kitchen on the left side of the restaurant, which gives the suggestion that the food is really fresh.
Well this is true! My pizza tasted really good, and the prices were okay. I’d really suggest going here if you want to get a good Italian Pizza!

Looks like a new Italian restaurant chain. If so– quite nice. Good food, good service a safe place to go among all these strange places in Cardiff. :-)

It’s been years since I was in an Ask restaurant — I shouldn’t have left it so long. The menu was varied and interesting (and not just pizza and pasta) and the dishes arrived exactly as described — by no means always the case.
For example, the olives were described as «tiny, sweet Nicoise olives alongside chunky Manzanilla olives in a herby marinade» and that’s what we got, in a generously sized bowl.
Our other starter was a creamy, garlicky dip with a few mushroom pieces and plenty of rosemary ciabatta and bread. It benefited from some extra seasoning, but that’s the right way to be.
My companion was very pleased with her Pollo Marsala, and I enjoyed my seafood linguine, although in this case it was little too salty, even for seafood, but not to an extent that spoiled the dish. (Seasoning seems to be a recent theme of my reviews).
The house white wine was refreshing and a great accompaniment to both the starters and mains.
Service was very good, with our friendly waiter keeping an unobtrusive eye on us.
We had booked online and took advantage of the «2 for 1 mains» voucher offer they were running. Both went smoothly, and the bill then came to £36 for the items already mentioned.
You wouldn’t go to any chain restaurant for a special celebration, but for an evening meal before a concert, it hit the spot brilliantly. I’d certainly eat there again next time I’m in that part of time, and there’s plenty of competition in the Italian style eateries nearby.

I had been going to this branch of Ask for a few years. I started going more frequently recently (like 3 times in a month) and the standards had gone through the floor. I have experienced parts of my order being forgotten, one dessert being brought out while the other is left to melt on the counter, 40 minute wait for a starter, bland food, scrimping on ingredients, of course, the obvious price rises, and most annoyingly… Twice in one week we have practically been ignored by the waiter;
One day we waited 40 minutes for our bill before my friend had enough and went and asked. Then, another time, we had to wait half an our to order our desserts (and again only did after me friend demanded we should order) and another half hour for the bill which AGAIN my friend had to go and ask for herself.
At Ask, they just seem to leave you there on your own. We regularly ate our main course without drinks because they took so long to bring it out (so we had finished our initial drinks) and practically dumped the food and ran so we could not order more. They were not even busy. They cannot be treating all their customers this shabbily because they would not have any… or maybe everyone else has low expectations… I am certainly off Ask though. Shame as I haven’t been back there in so long.

Now, I don’t usually review chain restaurants and I visit them rarely. On this occassion I’m making an exception, just because I enjoy visiting this Ask a great deal and found it to be a rather good experience on a number of occassions.
Ask is rather like Pizza Express and Prezzo, the standard of the restaurant can vary hugely between places. For example; where I used to live in Hampshire there was an amazing Pizza Express in the country village Arlesford, but down the road in the town of Alton it was so bad it hurt.
Of course the food should show some consitency and there isn’t anything to shout about here, although it is quite adequate and offers enough variety to make a meal interesting.
I enjoy the setting of this Ask a great deal, set into a triangle of an arcade entrance it is quite unusual and the large glass windows allow for a spot of people watching over a nice glass of Cava. The décor is tasteful and it is a relaxing place to eat dinner.

As you may have noticed through a quick glance at my reviews, I take issue with chain restaurants. Too often they are bland, soulless places where good food goes to die, only to be reheated and served to the yammering masses who couldn’t spell flavour if it was written on their plate in letters made of steak. Occasionally though, you can have one of the better meals around at them, when the chef’s on a good day, where everything comes together and the mass market appeal actually appeals to you.
Ask seems to bounce back and forth between these two extremes, moreso than any other restaurant. Much like Bella Italia, they hold a special place in my heart for their culinary treats; Ask was the first place I tried risotto and subsequently all my future experiences at Ask restaurants are filtered through that glorious night.
That was London though, on the tail end of an already excellent night. Sadly, Cardiff has yet to live up to that standard. The food has always been a little… well, meh. It’s been nothing awful, but nothing special, and when you’re paying Ask prices for it, you don’t want to be eating «meh». The staff are always great though; they’re attentive and occasionally cross the line into being annoying, but never too badly. At least you know they seem to care.

I haven’t eaten at this ASK very recently, but there’s a good reason for this: my last visit was a bit of a disaster.
I was there with a fairly big group of about 20 people, and they got four of our orders wrong, including my pizza which arrived with anchovies on it. This meant that while the other 16-​odd people tucked in to their food, we were sat waiting for our pizzas to be remade, and when they arrived everyone else had practically finished. Embarrassing.
On the previous occasions I’ve eaten there my experience hasn’t been quite so bad, but there’s always been something that went a bit awry — such as the salad arriving way after the pizzas, and the waitress forgetting to bring our bill.
It’s a shame because the restaurant itself is tastefully put together and positioned in an attractive location, but after my last experience I’d probably just opt for Pizza Express next time.

I did not know this, but ASK does take away. Armed with with this knowledge I decided to try this bad boy out.
Being boring I had a pizza, being adventurous I went for the Vesuvio which is hotter than Cardiff, or so you would believe with the shorts and sandal brigade swanning around.
£5 for that thankyou very much and was a good individual size without being too much. And for that I had some room for desert, slightly more expensive £5 also I got a Honey comb cheesecake, yum. We didn’t have to wait too long either which was nice and you don’t get things like that at your BUrger king do you!

I do not like ASK. I have been to cuple in different places in the country and in every one I have come out feeling unsatisfied.
In this one we were greeted by a waiter who was moderately friendly but clearly wasn’t interested in whether we enjoyed our meal.
The food itself was average at best, with neither of us enjoying our meal particularly.
The service throughout the meal was only just acceptable.
All in all, this added up to something below par.