Waiter, there’s something fishy about this lobster...

Italian chain Ask is fined over cheap seafood in £14.95 dish

It may have been the most expensive item on the menu, but Ask Italian’s lobster and king prawn pasta was a bit lacking in something – lobster.

the chain’s tagliatelle dish contained almost as much cheap white fish as it did luxury crustacean.

trading standards officers found the raw ingredient used in the sauce for ‘aragosta e gamberoni’ was a pack of frozen Lobster Sensations, which contains 35 per cent lobster, 34 per cent white fish and other items such as potato starch and soy protein.

Azzuri Restaurants, which owns 112 Ask Italian branches around Britain, was fined £40,000 after it admitted misleadingly describing its food. the lobster dish had been on the menu since 2014 priced at £14.95 and proved popular, selling orders worth £3million.

But the cost of the raw ingredients was only £2.84, including just 70p worth of lobster, Swansea Magistrates’ Court heard on tuesday.

the lack of lobster in the dish was spotted by a Swansea Council trading standards officer on a routine visit to Ask Italian in the city last March. She ordered the dish and asked to see the ingredients.

‘the officer was shown the raw ingredients but to her it did not look like or resemble lobster meat so she asked to see the original packaging,’ Lee Reynolds, prosecuting, told the court.

‘It turned out to be something called Lobster Sensations, which described itself as “a delicious blend of real lobster and lobsterflavoured seafood made with surimi, a fully cooked fish protein”.

‘this was being sold as lobster throughout the national chain of restaurants. We say consumers did not get what the consumer was entitled to expect when ordering the dish... proper lobster.’

Ask removed the dish from its menu, apologised and accepted that, without reference to white fish, the menu description was likely to mislead.

Oliver Campbell, for Ask, said there had been no intention to mislead. the firm ‘strongly denied’ a financial motivation, as the dish had the lowest profit margin of all its pasta choices, he said.