The heart of Hamilton was hit by a power outage last night, forcing many bars and restaurants in the city to close early.

The fault occurred at a city substation just after 7.30pm, just as scores of restaurant diners were sitting down to an evening meal.

It also affected electricity supplies in the west end. According to a Belco spokesman, power was restored to Warwick, Southampton and Sandys parishes “fairly quickly”, but parts of Hamilton remained cut off for almost two hours, with street lights and traffic signals out of order and many establishments plunged into darkness. Power was eventually restored at around 9pm.

And restaurant bosses claim they were also left in the dark after they were unable to contact the electricity supplier to find out what had caused the outage, or how long it would last.

Although patrons at a number of restaurants on Bermudiana Road remained at their tables to enjoy a drink during the outage, all food was off the menu as customers were turned away.

“We have had to close for the night — we had no choice,” Portofino managing director Simone Maranzana said at around 8pm.

“We can’t prepare food and it is not safe in the kitchen so it had to be vacated — everything has come to a standstill.”

Mr Maranzana said that the restaurant had been fully booked on what is typically the busiest week of the year for the popular Italian eatery.

“We had a full house so this is going to cost us a lot of money,” he said. “It’s very sad, we have never had anything of this magnitude before.

“From what I’ve been told two generators have gone down at Belco. I was told that by two police officers — I haven’t actually been able to get through to Belco and that’s the frustrating thing — we have no idea when power is going to come back on.”

Sosina Mekonnen, co-owner of Muse on Front Street also shut her business down early.

“The power’s been out for about an hour now and we made the decision to shut at around 8pm,” Ms Mekonnen told The Royal Gazette.

“I did call Belco but all I got was voicemail, voicemail, voicemail. We would normally stay open until around 10pm or 11pm, so we’ve lost some revenue because of this.”

And Casey’s Lounge on Queen Street also stopped serving well before its regular closing time.

“Apart from the fact that we can’t use soda guns, we would be breaking health regulations if we stayed open because, without power we don’t have running water,” the bar’s manager, Yvette Butterfield said.

Last night a Belco spokesman apologised to customers for the outage and explained that the company’s normally reliable backup system had failed.

“There was a problem at the Par-la-Ville substation and one of the transformers tripped,” the spokesman said.

“Normally a second transformer would pick up the load but there was another problem and it failed to do so, so we went into load shed where the system starts dropping power.

“Because the fault was at a substation, it affected circuits coming out of that substation supplying power to other parts of the Island.

“We were able to get those areas, in Warwick, Southampton and Sandys, back on fairly quickly but there was a more complex problem in the city.

“We do apologise to all our customers for this inconvenience. As soon as Belco became aware of the problem we worked to address it and were able to get power back on to everybody by about 9pm.

“This was an unusual occurrence where our backup faulted but we are not anticipating further problems.”