AN EX-BAR manager will sell his Porsche and ride a scooter instead to help fund the conversion of an historic pub into a retro burger bar.
Dan Lucas, 38, from Little Baddow, will open Boutique Café Bar in place of Judge Tindal's on Thursday, May 1, after buying the venue in February.
Yet with a wedding also planned this summer, the former Broomfield schoolboy is placing his beloved Boxter S on the market for £7,500 to ensure his 20-year-old dream becomes reality.
"I'm sad to be selling it," said Dan, who used the car for a holiday in Ireland where he proposed to his fiancée Amy Gage.
"I've had great fun out of it and it's a lovely car but needs must. If you've got a dream and you want to follow it you have to make some sacrifices, in my case the car."
Dan plans to open the venue up to as many as 50 diners for food at any one time, serving 100 per cent Aberdeen Angus beef and ten beers, originating from breweries in Hoxton and Shoreditch, into the night.
While in the process of recruiting 15 staff, he already faces an uphill financial struggle in finding the cash to pay carpenters and decorators to revamp the tavern.
"I'll still be able to open if I don't sell the car," he said.
"But I would struggle. That £7,500 is not a lot of money to some people but to others it's like £1 million, it's a vast chunk which I could plough into the business."
The building in Tindal Street is believed to date back to the 1700s and was praised as being the only site to survive as a historic tavern on the strip after the nearby Corn Exchange was demolished from May 1969.
The road was previously home to The Spotted Dog and The Dolphin. Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is rumoured to have drunk a cup of tea when it was a coffee shop before performing live at the Exchange on February 25, 1967, prompting Dan to name a corner after him.
He has also submitted a variation of licence application to keep the bar open, and to serve alcohol, until 2am.
"I'm very excited I'm doing what I wanted to do since I was a young bar tender in Chicago Rock Café," said Dan, a former manager of Baroosh, in Duke Street.
Despite Judge Tindal's becoming the latest pub to leave the city, beer lovers are praising the move.
Doug Irons, chairman of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) Chelmsford & Mid Essex branch, said: "If this is still serving beer and real ale it's carrying on. I wish him good luck."
Critics said Judge Tindal's had hit a brick wall, with one anonymously saying it lacked vision, that it had gone down-market and was relying on cheap beer.
