TOWN centre restaurant has closed after the proprietor was locked out in the middle of talks over his rent.

Ian Goldsworthy opened Amigos, on Colchester’s North Hill, in July 2013, but was forced to close last Sunday.

Mr Goldsworthy, 60, claimed he had asked his landlord to help him over the rent while he carried out £10,000 of improvements to the building, replacing two boilers, laying a new restaurant floor and installing a dumb waiter.

However, he said before he had even been given an answer by the owner, Brosh, he discovered the firmhad sent in a locksmith to shut him out.

The first he knew of it was a phone call from his alarm company in the early hours of Monday morning, telling him the burglar alarm had been triggered.

Since then, Mr Goldsworthy says he has not been able to get into the building, leaving stock and equipment worth thousands of pounds stuck inside.

He said: “We went to the landlord and said we were prepared to make the investment, but we needed their support if we got behind on rent a little bit.

“We needed to know we were not going to be kicked out.

“It’s £50,000 a year – and I am a bit behind. We were basically asking them to back us and to make sure our tenure was solid.

“The landlord’s answer was to change the locks.”

Mr Goldsworthy said, in line with many restaurants, it had experienced a quiet first four months of the year.

He added: “It’s all been a bit of an unpleasant experience this week and we are upset, but we’ve loved running the place and we loved the staff. We feel really sorry for them.”

The restaurant employed six full-time staff and ten parttimers.

Mr Goldsworthy originally planned to open Amigos in partnership with experienced restaurateur Patrick Benois, but the partnership dissolved weeks before it opened.

As a result, his initial £15,000 investment in the business had to be doubled. He says he suffered further problems because the weeks leading up to the opening were so disrupted, he was unable to check the building properly, leading to persistent electrical and and plumbing problems.

Mr Goldsworthy said his experiences means he would avoid the catering trade in future and focus, instead, on the north Essex-based consumer magazine he also runs.

The Gazette approached Brosh for a comment, but got no response before we went to press.