Sous Chef

Sous Chef is the best restaurant you've never been to. The menu combines locally sourced ingredients, many of which are organic, in the kind of modern British comfort food that restaurants such as Room and the sadly missed Marmalade in Chorlton built their reputations on: for example, baked goat's cheese tart with beetroot, shallots and a walnut dressing (£4), or slow cooked lamb shank pie with braised red cabbage (£8.50).

The wine list is reasonably priced with some exceptionally good bottles in the range, and the service – well, the service goes a step beyond. In a normal restaurant, the waiter brings food direct to your table. Sous Chef, on the other hand, brings your food all the way to your house, or your office, or anywhere else you might happen to be (as long as it is in the Didsbury area). But rather than bringing you a rapidly cooling takeaway carton, they prepare the meal almost all the way – and then you finish it off at home, ensuring that your meal is as fresh and hot as it would be if you'd cooked it entirely from scratch yourself.

So, for example, you might browse through the menu on their website at lunchtime, decide on leek, potato and roasted garlic soup with homemade parmesan toasts to start, followed by roast Cheshire chicken breast with Cumbrian pancetta wrap, ricotta and herb stuffing and roasted tomato couscous, and rounded off with a delectable sticky toffee pudding and dairy ice cream. You place your order and the waiting staff will deliver it to you at 5:30, just as you're leaving the office. Arriving home you slip the chicken into the oven and put the soup on the hob. You kick off your shoes, turn on the TV, pour the soup into your favourite mug and savour it slowly. By the time you've finished, the chicken is ready…

We wouldn't normally include somewhere like Sous Chef in the Manchester Restaurant Guide. It is, after all, (whisper it) a takeaway. But to call it a takeaway is to miss the point entirely. This is restaurant-quality food, made freshly to order and delivered direct to your door. There's a weekday menu, coming in at under £5 a dish and with less than 500 calories a serving. There's an onsite deli where you can pick up the recipes, ingredients and bottles from the wine list if you're inspired to cook from scratch. Think of the luxury, the hassle-free dinner parties, the romantic ‘home cooked' dinners… the possibilities are endless!