Ask Italian

Nice food, good service and a lovely setting.
The food is the same as every other Ask in the country but the setting is what gives this particular Ask 4 stars. The building is lovely and sitting out on a summer’s vafternoon is quite nice.
The food is good and pretty cheap and the service was fast.

Can’t fault Ask Italian.
We have eaten there several times and on every occasion it has been fantastic! The restaurant itself is a pleasure to be in and is an amazing buiding. The staff are friendly and helpful and the quality of the food is 5 star!
The only problem we have ever had is i ordered an amaretto and coke once but it was missing the amaretto, the barman assured me it was in there but when he tried it admitted it wasn’t! No worries though, they replaced it and apologised!
The dessert wine in there is amazing!
Will definately go again and highly recommend it!

lovely little place but got very loud. food was very good but pudding was expensive for the size of the portion.

Went here for my teenage daughter’s birthday and had a very relaxed and enjoyable meal. We went on a Tuesday early evening so no need to book a table as there was plenty of room. Still reasonable busy though and a good atmosphere with a mix of families, couples and group of friends. The waitress was very friendly and attentive, with helpful advice about the menu and specials available. The food was quick to arrive and the Pizza was very good, pasta perfectly cooked and delicious puddings. We used a 2 for 1 voucher deal so not only had an enjoyable meal but it was good value too. We liked the fact the menu was well suited to both younger children and adults. Would definatelly go back on another occasion, especially on a week day evening as it can get rather busy at the weekend and tables are fairly close together.

Staff very friendly and efficient. Food excellent. Place is all hard surfaces as many of these places are. That makes it noisy and echoey when full.
Would definately return.

A new arrival to Abingdon in 2008, this restaurant is in the building known as Pulpit House, on the Square, which was the former Abingdon Congregational Church. The restaurant is one of our Abingdon team’s favourite places to eat in the area.

Been a while since my last visit but I’m guessing things can’t have changed all that much.
It’s obviously part of a chain and so the look is pretty standard. Friendly staff and very nice food (pizza styleee). Pick a quieter time and it’s very child friendly, although probably best avoided with the kiddies later in the evening when it starts to get crowded.
The patio area is pretty close to the main road in and out of Abingdon so possibly not the best place to be sitting in the sunshine but options are limited in the town when it comes to outside seating so the space is very much a bonus!
Been back a few times since my review (above) and I have to say that it’s actually one of my favourite places to eat. With a beer or bottle of wine, it’s fab sitting out in the sun & doing a spot of people-​watching. Very friendly staff and if you keep an eye open for the various email/​web offers they throw around the internet, you can have a meal out without breaking the bank.

Went for the first time to ASK despite the mixed reviews. It was neither a lunch or dinner service, arrived around 4pm and was only one other couple there. However, we were greeted very well, and service was to a good high standard. The food was of a good quality however, Im positive that you can gain very similar dishes in Pizza Express for a few pounds cheaper. I assume the added cost is purely for the great surroundings in the grade listed building.
Overall is what I expected, definatley a nice place to sit and eat, however, with the table spacing I would be reluctant to eat their when its full, as the may not be so comfortable to chat with your company so to speak.

Despite reading everyones reports with regards to this venue, I decided to take my father and brother here for a spot to eat last week, and we were quite impressed.
Yes it is a chain restaurant, but i have no problem with that, as long as the service is good and of course the food is tasty too. Which it was.
My brother and I shared one of the mixed starters, with salami, bread, olives and the like. This was just ok. Too me the salami tasted funny, but all the other bits were alright. For a main, I went for a Margherita pizza with pepperoni, and this pizza was damn tasty! A good sized pizza too. To finish off with, i had a chocolate orange flavoured fudge cake, which was delicious.
The waitress was very friendly, helpful and also chatty, which makes a nice change!
The venue itself is quite stunning from the outside, but a tad boring on the inside. The place could do with some pictures!
Overall, i would say, that you shouldn’t let the fact that it is a chain restaurant bother you. It will make quite a nice suprise!

I vsited the new Ask restaurant in Abingdon for the first time last week.
It is in a very visually attractive building, at present all on the ground floor but there is a huge balconied upstairs section which they are apparently hoping to extend the restaurant to in the future, at present they can only access it with a ladder!
It is quite chilly in the building, we were sat right at the back so thought we would be safe from draughts etc, but then realised that the staff were going back and forth to the bins through the back exit right next to where we were sitting so it was a bit draughty! One of the people I was with was so cold she put her coat on between courses!
The food was nice, nothing really special but Im quite a fussy eater so didnt want anything too fancy anyway! They have a special board which bizarrely had sausage and bean casserole on it the day I went — is that Italian?!
I couldnt fault the service, the staff were great and really helpful. I just wish they had an option to have smaller portions for slightly less money as I dont eat huge amounts and feel wasteful and ungrateful leaving so much on my plate.
But a nice addition to Abingdon anyway.

This is newly opened in Abingdon, so I went for the first time last week. The building itself is very impressive, a great place to sit and have your dinner! It was extremley busy when I went, but the service was still very good. Our waitress was very friendly, and drinks and food came in good time. i had the prawn and bean itialian cassarole, which was very good. It came with some garlic ciabatta bread which was very nice too, but the side salad was a bit on the small side. I think this is definatley somewhere I would coma again– great food and great service in a great location.

Ask is the new restaurant in town — but not the best. Although it’s only in its infancy there are some issues it needs to sort out.
We went for a family Sunday lunch. The waitresses were all young and inexperienced (ours got my drink order wrong), although friendly and helpful.
The new décor looks impressive, but the acoustics are awful. Whenever someone visits the bathroom and uses the hand drier, it sounds like a fighter jet taking off. Which just makes you very aware when someone uses the bathroom and doesn’t use the hand drier.
The menu is immense, and they could probably benefit from cutting down on the choices and making sure they do those dishes well — because the food is edible, but not legendary. The portions are generous, but the flavours are not.
All in all it’s not an experience I would rush to repeat.

For your information, how is it possible to name yet ANOTHER Ask restaurant, as Italian??? There is nothing, whatsoever, Italian about it!!! Stop fuelling the chain culture!!!
P.s I shamefully had to add 1 star to this restaurant because I was forced to! It should have –40 000 000 000!

Just what Abingdon needs — Yet Another Generic Italian Restaurant.
Ask is new here in Abingdon, opening its doors at the beginning of September.
The building itself is fantastic, with wrought-​iron pillars and balustrades to the (unused) first floor, and a large terrace area to the front. The building has stood empty for a very long time, so at least it’s good to see it being used.
As you can imagine, Ask is a novelty in town at the moment, so it’s always pretty busy — however we didn’t have a problem getting a table for 4 on Sunday evening. The design of the building means it’s pretty loud, but not too loud for conversation.
However — while the architecture and ambience are great, the food leaves quite a lot to be desired.
The starters were OK — I ordered the mussels and Gerry the stuffed mushrooms. I found the mushrooms nondescript and the mussels, while tasty, were overpowered by the tomato sauce.
The main course — chicken & prawns with butter beans — was again totally overpowered by tomato, and I’d venture a guess that the base sauce was exactly the same as that used for the mussels. Gerry’s Penne with Gorgonzola was claggy (I’d venture that the pasta may even have been reheated) and, surprisingly, lacked any sort of cheese flavour.
We asked the waiter about it and he mentioned that they’d changed the recipe after someone had complained that the dish was ‘too cheesy’, which strikes me as odd. Surely if you order a Gorgonzola dish, you’re going to expect it to taste predominantly of the cheese?
A cheesecake for dessert was reasonably good, and the whole meal was reasonably priced, working out at about £35 per head for four of us including wine and coffee.
So overall, Ask Abingdon is Yet Another Generic Italian Restaurant in a town already saturated with Italian food, offering nothing spectacular or memorable about it.
If you want good quality Italian food, I would suggest walking a few yards along the street and going to Limoncello, which is smaller but is, at least, a genuine Italian family restaurant.