Raymond Fusco, of Quayside, Whitby, swapped the North East for the Far East last month, cooking the UK’s best fish and chips in two Japanese department stores.

The award-winning Quayside, which was named ‘Independent Takeaway Fish & Chip Shop of the Year’, was invited to take part in a festival of British food at the two high-end department stores.

Raymond, a third generation fish frier and previous Young Fish Frier of the year, jumped at the chance to represent his family’s restaurant overseas.

"It was an honour to be invited”, said Raymond. "I really wanted to show the Japanese customers what proper British fish and chips are all about.

"I couldn’t have dreamed to get the reaction that we did. People were running to get to the front of the queue, which at times, was over two hours long.

"Something that I definitely didn’t anticipate was the number of customers wanting to a picture taken with me, so I needed to pause for a second for the picture and then get back to work!”

Raymond, the youngest of the Fusco sons, served over 1200 portions of fish and chips a day to the customers of Hakata Hankyu at Fukuoka and the Hankyu Umeda at Osaka, two of the biggest department stores in Western Japan.

Akin to Britain’s Harrods or Claridges, the stores draw upwards of 50 million shoppers from various parts of Japan each year.

For more on Quayside, log on to whitbyfishandchips.com