Food and Drinks
The drinks menu is mostly dominated by alcoholic drinks and house cocktails but they offer juices and sodas as an alternative. The food menu offers diners tapas, western mains, Japanese dishes, Sri Lankan rice and curry and a separate pasta menu.
The Tapas menu is categorized according to their prices starting from Rs. 200 and ending at Rs. 500. We tried their Yasai Itame (Rs. 400), Karage (Rs.500) and Ebi Chili (Rs. 500). The Yasai Itame is a vegetable stir fry and was actually our favourite tapas because it was spicy and full of flavour. The Karage is a Japanese style deep fried chicken served with garlic sauce while the Ebi Chili is pan fried shrimps in a sweet chilly sauce. Quite reasonably priced, they offer quite a lot in terms of quantity and if you order several dishes like we did – it might just fill you up before your mains!
For our mains we tried their Chicken with Mustard Sauce (Rs. 950), the Spicy Tuna Roll (Rs. 1250) and their Shrimp and Mushroom Pasta (Rs. 900). It felt odd to eat Japanese in Ella because it’s the last place we’d expect to find Japanese but since Akane personally creates and decides the menu the restaurant is well known for their Japanese dishes. The Spicy Tuna Roll wasn’t particularly spicy but it was a pretty good dish as the pieces were quite large and there were plenty to be shared among three persons.
Italian is also one of their specialties and our pasta dish was what we enjoyed the most. Our cream-based pasta had plenty of shrimp and mushroom and was made with just the right consistency of cream where it wasn’t too dry nor too watery. The pasta menu has nearly 20 different options and nearly every one of them was tempting.
Unfortunately, the Chicken in Mustard Sauce was a disappointment.
The dish is served with a bowl of rice but the sauce had an overpowering flavour of mustard that was difficult to get past even mixed in with plain rice.
Nevertheless, we actually had a great food experience at AK Ristoro. Since we were a group of three, we ordered a main and tapas each but eventually we ended up with too much food because the portions are very generous.