Restaurant review: Mount Fuji, Swindon by John Lanchester

Swindon can be made the basis of a useful and informative word-association test. Say the name of the town to most people and their response is, "Please, God, no!" Mention it to someone with a background in business or economics, however, and they say something different. They say, "Honda." The car company's huge plant here is central to the economics of the area. It produces 600 cars a day, or one every couple of minutes. There's no mistaking the place when you drive past: the factory is a ginormous shed that at night is lit an unearthly blue. It's one of those functional-looking buildings that acquires a certain sublimity by virtue of its sheer size.

Mount Fuji
Stanton House hotel, Stanton Fitzwarren, Swindon, Wiltshire
SN6 7SD
0870 084 1388


Open Fri and Sat evening only. Meal with drinks and service, from £35 a head

A giant Honda plant means many Japanese executives a long way from home needing somewhere to sleep and eat. And many Japanese executives needing somewhere to sleep and eat means the Stanton House hotel, about three minutes down the road from the factory, in a parkland setting that's remarkably calm and quiet given how close it is to the factory action. The hotel has two restaurants, the Rosemary, which has a familiar European setting, and Mount Fuji, which has Japanese-style seating and is open only at weekends.

I went for the Mount Fuji option on the grounds that it would be more fun. That may well be right: the layout of Japanese restaurants, with wood panelling and seating on the floor, is exciting but not scary. You have to take off your shoes (matching socks advisable). I'd been expecting to have to sit crosslegged for the whole meal, and to be needing a winch and some WD-40 to get back on my feet. Luckily, though, the tables have a central space, so you can sit on the floor with your feet beneath them, if so inclined. One or two customers, I noticed, sat crosslegged anyway. Memo to them: nobody likes a show-off.

The downside to Mount Fuji is that the kitchen is some distance away, attached to the Rosemary restaurant, which offers an à la carte menu, as opposed to Mount Fuji's all-set menu option. It may be that the choice boils down to the fun of Japanese seating versus the more formal setting and better food of the Rosemary. That kitchen distance is hard on things such as tempura, which depend on being served as soon as they're cooked. The Japanese execs at the next table, relaxing in polo shirts after their hard week, were eating sukiyaki, a fondue-type dish that you cook at the table for yourself. They were rinsing it down with pints of Arkell's bitter and seemed to be having a great time.

The rest of the menu is a range of bento boxes, with four options priced from a weirdly specific £25.65 to £35.90. They offer no choice in the mains, and a choice of two starters and two puddings. Many dishes appear in all the bentos, so you have to pay attention to spot the differences, which come down to how much sushi you want, or whether you'd rather have a vegetarian menu. I'd love to be able to report that the food is so good there's no point going to Tokyo, but I can't, because although it's perfectly decent, it is no better than that.

A pre-dinner nibble of jellyfish and sesame seeds with tiny flecks of chilli was delicate and precise and soothing; slow-cooked belly pork laced with mustard was superb. Sushi and sashimi were both excellent, and I'd have been happy to stick to them. Grilled eel with Japanese omelette was very sweet, as were the chicken teriyaki and chicken yakitori. Japanese cooking is fairly sweet anyway, since it contains a lot of mirin; if more sweetening is added, as it often is in home cooking and in restaurants that emulate home cooking, it can go over the top.

Mount Fuji's overall effect is that of a place where the execs go for dinner and a few drinks, rather than to scale culinary heights. That gives it a pleasant and very relaxed feeling, enhanced by the attentive and effective one-woman service. If I ever get to go to a businessmen's chill-out restaurant in Tokyo, I plan to sigh contentedly and say, "This place reminds me of Swindon."
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