I AM being served a delicious banquet of Mediterranean-style dab, roast coley with a shrimp butter and a fragrant curry made from whiting.

You’d be mistaken for thinking I am dining at a flash seafood restaurant on the Cornish Riviera.

In fact, I am sitting inside a chippie just off the Hagley Road in land-locked Birmingham.

The Great British Eatery isn’t your average take-away, though. Bosses Conrad Brunton and Andy Insley are passionate about pushing the boundaries of the traditional fish and chip shop and are doing so by going back to the future.

The ex-schoolmates are enthusiastic to sell fish species that all too often are neglected simply because they have fallen out of favour in an era dominated by cod. The ex-schoolmates are passionate supporters of the Fish Fight campaign headed by TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, which is calling for the “insane” practice of so-called discards to be banned.

Fearnley-Whittingstall exposed the ludicrous workings of EU-backed regulations which lead to about half of the fish caught in the North Sea being thrown back into the water as discards. The majority of the fish die.

Under the quota system, fishermen have to dump catches that are too young, over-fished or for which they do not have a quota. The problem arises because fishermen are unable to control the species caught in their nets in mixed fisheries. If they pick up over-fished cod when they are trawling for haddock, they have to throw back all the cod, even if they are dead.

The same fate befalls perfectly tasty and nutritious but less popular fish such as flounder, dab, coley and pouting.

EU fisheries minister Maria Damanaki is now set to ban discards but getting cod-lovers to try varieties that would have been more familiar to their grandparents may be a bigger challenge.