Mary-Ellen McTague has confirmed that her Chorlton restaurant The Creameries has sadly closed down for good. Despite reviews from national critics, and a recent revamp with an Italian menu, the celebrated chef has said a combination of the hangover from the pandemic and rising costs made the business no longer viable.
“The whole thing has been awful, but it has been like that since the beginning of the pandemic,” she told the Manchester Evening News. She had been trying to sell the business for some months, but had a number of potential buyers pull out at the last minute.
“There was still a chance we were going to make a sale. We had three consecutive buyers who were very close, and then backed away,” she went on. “The longer the economic instability has gone on, the more and more nervous [buyers] have been.”
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Mary-Ellen, formerly a sous chef at Heston Blumenthal’s multi Michelin-starred Fat Duck and then co-owner of Aumbry in Prestwich, opened The Creameries in 2018 on the site of a former dairy. The Observer’s Jay Rayner noted its ‘seriously good, thoughtful food’ in a rave review a year or so later.
“In September 2019, we started operating just as a restaurant, doing tasting menus, and it was working so well,” she said. “We had a brilliant Jay Rayner review, it was packed, we were making money, not just keeping afloat. Then the pandemic hit, and we’ve been f**ked since then.
“We tried so hard. To adapt and survive, and it just didn’t work. The start of this year, we tried [Italian menu] Campagna, and it was busy for a little while, but didn’t stay busy. The food coming out was amazing, and it was affordable, and the front of house team were doing an amazing job. We just couldn’t get enough business through the door.
“There are fewer people eating out, and there’s less of a market, but we were dealing with a two year period where we hadn’t been bringing enough money in. There was just this massive backlog, the loans we had to start making repayments on, VAT went back up. It felt like a game of Whack A Mole.
“Pre-pandemic it was really, really, really hard to get to the point where more money was going in than coming out. Restaurants don’t talk about it a lot, but if you ask people off the record, most will say that getting to the point where you’ve done slightly better than break even, that’s a strong month.
“Things went from challenging to just completely impossible.” It follows a number of recent closures, including chef Ben Humphreys’ Northern Quarter restaurant District announcing it will close as a restaurant and re-open as a bar in November, citing rising costs.
As for The Creameries, the neighbourhood spot now has a new tenant, though plans for the unit are currently not known. Going forward, Mary-Ellen is co-founder of Eat Well MCR, the non-profit organisation which has provided over 70,000 free meals to those in food poverty around the city.
She will be working on the opening of the new Treehouse Hotel in Manchester, where she will be chef-owner of the hotel’s ground floor restaurant, as well as overseeing the banqueting and in-room food offering.
It opens early next year.
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