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The food has to be really good for this effect, which, at Aumbry, it was.

A visit to Mary-Ellen McTague’s Aumbry in Prestwich, outside Manchester, was like walking into her front room.

She and her husband Laurence Tottingham should know: when they opened Aumbry in 2009, their son was 15 months old.

Photograph: Pål Hansen for Observer Food Monthly Husband and wife, co-head chefs, Aumbry, Prestwich, Manchester "There's no preparing you for it," says Mary-Ellen McTague with a rueful shake of the head.

Aumbry was a dream that the couple had nurtured since they first met, a decade earlier, in the Lake District at Sharrow Bay, the acclaimed country house hotel on Ullswater.