Telephone: 01793 861777
Address: Rosemary Restaurant, The Avenue, Stanton Fitzwarren, Swindon, Wiltshire
Rating: 16/20

The story goes like this: a friend of mine rang me up the other day, and said, "I expect you know this, but there is a very good Japanese restaurant at the Honda factory at Swindon, which is open to the public." No, I said, I did not know this, but it seemed like a cracking idea. So I rang the Honda factory at Swindon and said, "Is it true that there is a Japanese restaurant at your factory that is open to the public?"

"No, it is not true," said the woman who answered the phone most politely, and my heart sank. "But," she went on, "Honda owns a hotel, the Stanton House Hotel, at Stanton Fitzwarren, just outside Swindon, and that has a Japanese restaurant to which workers and public can go."

"That'll do for me," I said. So my daughter, Tucker Thompson and I piled into the car, and off we went.

There can be few more resolutely English place names than Stanton Fitzwarren and, from the outside, few more resolutely English hotels than Stanton House. It looks like a Cotswold village girt with landscaped car parks, which were filled with Japanese cars, Japanese families, with Japanese children rushing up and down the carefully moulded grassy banks.

This curious sense of conjunction and disjunction continued in the restaurant itself, which goes by the name of Rosemary. It was a vision of a slightly superior works canteen - Anaglypta paper on the ceiling, pub carpet, mahogany-dark pine tables, Muzak - with Japanese detailing - prints, screens, chopsticks. The illusion that it was a works canteen was emphasised by the numbers of tables occupied by people who were clearly in the area on Honda business. To be fair, there were also one or two other tables occupied by casual eaters like us.

Any further attempt at cross-cultural bridge-building, however, was abandoned when it came to the menu, which was resolutely Japanese, from endame (young green soya beans) to una chazuke (eel cooked in two ways). There were familiar dishes - yakitori, ngiri sushi and tempura - and the less familiar - hiyayakko (cold tofu with ginger, leek and bonito flakes), sake kama yaki (grilled salmon head), zaru udon or soba (cold noodles served with cold soba soup) and yak.

The daughter and Tucker both picked out sansai udon or soba (udon noodles in hot soba soup with mixed mountain vegetables and Japanese omelette). The daughter also decided that she couldn't do without a helping of yakitori (chicken on skewers with sweet soya sauce). I came to the conclusion that the kaiseki bento box would probably be the best way to try as many dishes as possible without going through the agonising business of deciding which they should be, but just as the daughter couldn't do without her yakitori, I decided that I couldn't do without gyutan shioyaki, or salt-grilled ox tongue with lemon soya sauce.

I would never pretend to be a leading authority on Japanese food, but if the evidence of my taste buds and pleasure centres is anything to go by, I'd say that the food coming out of Rosemary's kitchen is among the classier Japanese grub in Britain.

It's little things that we noticed. The daughter was particularly smitten with the yakitori, which was sweet, dainty and tender within the glossy sauce into which it had been dipped, a distinctly better class version of this old favourite. The soup with the udon noodles was very refined, allowing the delicate flavour of the mountain vegetables - bracken and fern shoots - and the omelette to shine. This reappeared cold in my bento box, providing a curious, but utterly delicious, surprise. Before that came the tongue, salt-grilled, which increased that organ's already marked density, and made it almost crisp on the outside, its concentrated flavour edged with salt. And in the eight compartments of my bento box was some of the finest sashimi and sushi I have had for years; a notable fillet of grilled eel, the richness of the flesh offset, oddly, by the sweetness of its glaze; textbook tempura; and a rather more gutsy stir-fried sirloin of beef with peppers and a mild chilli sauce. The contrasts between these dishes was nicely judged.

It all added up to a wholly unexpected and satisfying dinner, made all the more so because the bill came to a self-effacing £58.20, including a couple of lemonades, two glasses of wine and a couple of beers amounting to £14. I know that two of the party had only three dishes between them, but my bento box was just £24, and we were all properly full. All this caused me to reflect, as we drove away, just how much drinking wine affects the economics of eating out. If only I could cut it out altogether. Fat chance.

· Open Mon-Sun, 12 noon-2pm; Mon-Sat, 6-10pm; Sun, 6-9.30pm.Menus Kaiseki Bento, £24; Soyakado Bento, £19; Katsu Jyu, £14; Ten Jyu, £14; Una Chazuke, £17. Wheelchair access and WC.