From textiles to tasting tables.

Mara Hughes had spent eleven years learning how to listen to ingredients. That was how she put it, anyway, back when she was still Head Chef at a bistro in Leeds that people drove an hour to eat at.

Burnout did not arrive as a dramatic collapse. It was a quiet, accumulating exhaustion that finally caught up with her during a Tuesday service, when she found herself staring at a pass full of tickets and feeling absolutely nothing at all.

“I didn’t fall out of love with food. I fell out of love with the version of it that came with fourteen-hour days and a walk-in fridge instead of daylight.” Mara Hughes · North Starling Coffee

She left without much of a plan. What she did have was her friend Alice, whom she had known since school. Alice had just signed a lease on an old textile barn outside Hebden Bridge: stone walls, a sagging roof and about four times more space than her fledgling custom-apparel business needed.

Two weeks after telling Alice she was silly for taking on so much space, Mara asked whether she could have the other half. She had become fascinated by what happens to a coffee bean between a farm and a cup, and spent money she probably should not have spent on a second-hand one-kilogram roaster.

There were forty ruined batches before she produced one she was proud of. Then a stud wall went up through the old barn. On one side were screen-printing frames, drying racks and the smell of ink. On the other were green coffee sacks stacked against stone walls that had probably once held bales of wool.