The renowned Mt Fuji Japanese restaurant has had a £60,000 revamp. MICHELLE TOMPKINS went along for a taste

EAT AT:

Mt Fuji,

Stanton House Hotel,

The Avenue, Stanton Fitzwarren SN6 7SD.

Tel: 0870 084 1388

“I’LL come as long as I don’t have to eat raw fish,” was my husband’s predictable response when I suggested we visit the revamped Mt Fuji Japanese restaurant at Stanton House Hotel...and there was a time when he would have gone hungry.

Until recently, Mt Fuji was a traditional Japanese restaurant catering for Honda’s bigwigs, serving elegant sushi and several types of seaweed. In the 18 years since it first opened, it has picked up a number of accolades and mentions in prestigious foodie guides.

Now however, after a two-month closure and a £60,000 revamp, Mt Fuji has reopened as a yakiniku restaurant – an indoor barbeque, if you like – and to my husband’s delight a veritable meat feast awaited us, with not one slice of raw tuna or sashimi in sight.

The look and feel of the place is still very different to the average dining experience in Swindon. For a start, you have to take your shoes off before you can step up onto the wooden platform which houses the hori-gotatsu, the low tables set into the floor.

The lighting is bright, verging on stark, and rather than a wine list you are presented with a choice of beers, soft drinks and Japanese vodkas, which I am told you are meant to drink neat over ice. We didn’t – it was a school night, after all – and opted instead for the recommended Asahi beer and mineral water to wash the food down.

We were invited guests and, as such, were treated to the £35 set menu. There are also menus at £30 and £25, or you can choose your own mix of dishes. To give an example of prices, 100g of beef fillet costs £15, while a dish of fried rice is is £3.90.

Our menu allowed us to chose from either a seafood salad or a selection of marinated vegetables to start. I had the vegetables – spinach, beansprouts and pickled cabbage – which were livened up by the spicy, sweet and sour dipping sauces laid out on the table. My husband had the seafood salad, a portion of prawns and mussels sat on lettuce and tomatoes. It was unfussy and needed the addition of a dressing, but he was too busy chasing his mussels around with his chopsticks to care.

The main course was when the real fun began. We’d each been asked to choose three meats from a list of five, and the seasoned raw materials arrived on a platter ready sliced, along with pieces of uncooked carrot, onion, courgette, corn, sweet potato and mushroom. Alongside were small bowls of sticky rice, sesame rice rolls, a heap of lettuce leaves and a rather strange seaweed soup, which tasted a little too much like seawater for our liking: definitely an acquired taste.

The yakiniku, or mini barbecue, is set into the centre of the table and your task for the evening is to cook your own dinner on the grill. We’d chosen chunky pieces of sirloin steak, thin strips of fillet steak, pork collar and rohsu, a kind of marbled beef with a higher fat content than the other meats. That said, it struck me that this kind of Japanese food must be pretty healthy, and certainly lower on the calorie-count than other cuisines.

The idea is to wrap your cooked meat in a lettuce leaf and dip it in the miso sauce, but our waitress reassured us that there really are no rules – just cook and eat however you like. It made for a sociable evening, as we had plenty of time to chat while the meat and veg sizzled away.

Dessert was a beautiful green tea pannacotta, surprisingly light for such a creamy dish.

When Mt Fuji first opened Japanese cuisine was a rarity, but these days most towns offer it in some form.

The idea behind the revamp was to move with the times, to provide something that can’t be found outside the big cities.

The Japanese customers from Honda are delighted – yakiniku is a real treat for them at home, at £100-plus a head – but the concept is not so alien that UK customers will be put off.

And if you still want sushi and seaweed? Well, it’s still on the menu, along with a shellfish option in place of the meat.

Or you can choose to visit the Rosemary Restaurant next door, which still serves the traditional sushi, tempura and teppanyaki.

  • Mt Fuji currently has a special offer running – visit in April and you’ll get a voucher for 50 per cent off your second visit.