'AIEA — Emilio Quiton will serve his final order of fish and chips and pull his last pitcher of beer Thursday night. Then on Saturday he'll auction off the European and Hawaiiana memorabilia that has been decorating his Elephant & Castle Restaurant & Pub for 30 years.

The countdown to the end has been hard on the regulars who have spent too many hours to count throwing darts and shooting pool in the pub — and drinking beer in the authentic whiskey keg chairs that Quiton set up around the bar.

The eight remaining employees — down from a one-time high of 28 — aren't doing much better.

A tear rolled down Robert Capinpin's cheek yesterday as he considered the question of how the pub's impending closure is affecting him.

"I keep it in my heart," said Capinpin, 57, who started out 30 years ago as a busboy/waiter and now does whatever's necessary to help Quiton keep The Elephant & Castle Restaurant & Pub running. "If I talk about it, I cry. So I just keep it inside. ... The customers — they're coming in by the droves, crying."

The Elephant & Castle's 30-year-lease is up at the end of the month and Quiton said he can't afford to renew it when he's already paying more than $17,000 per month in rent.

"If I have to rely on fish and chips, I wouldn't survive," Quiton said. "I sell a lot of food and a lot of beer, but I don't sell that much. ... I'd need to sell thousands of dollars a day just to stay open."

Quiton was born in Detroit and raised in Oregon, where he worked at a bar and restaurant called The Elephant & Castle while going to school at Portland State University.

On June 9, 1976, Quiton opened his Hawai'i version as one of the original tenants of the Newtown Square center.

Quiton quickly began decorating his Elephant & Castle with rich window treatments that he sewed by hand. He filled the pub with hundreds of artifacts — from kitschy Princess Di commemorative plates sitting in an authentic red metal and wood London telephone booth to an 11-foot-tall, mahogany Belgian hutch that reaches the pub's ceiling to a cannonball purportedly from the ship of Capt. James Cooke.

There are replicas of suits of armor, family crests, an enormous British flag that Quiton said flew over Lord Nelson's battleship and a Spanish chandelier bearing 20 candelabras. Portraits of British royalty line many of the walls, sometimes sharing space with Hawaiian royalty and lithographs and renderings of Hawaiian scenes.

A grandfather clock sitting along the back wall of the pub's banquet room has parts dating to 1854 and other pieces that go as far back as 1751.

"My house is even worse than this," Quiton said yesterday, looking around the 5,908- square-foot pub. "I have an attraction to things from the past, and I'm a Taurus. We're people who collect items."

One day about four years ago, Rideau Rogers walked into the pub with an oversized picture of himself as a 19-year-old boxer wearing the stare of the Air Force's European welterweight champ for 1958/1959.

Quiton promptly hung it in the pub's glass showcase, where it continued to sit yesterday just a few feet from Rogers' usual corner spot at the bar, near the entrance to the pub.

Rogers, 68, has spent much of his spare time over the past 20 years sitting in the same place, ordering fish and chips or sirloin steaks, drowned with only ice water and coffee.

Like some regulars, Rogers has already claimed his memento from the pub — the television and remote control that sit on the bar right next to Rogers' usual spot.

"I've been watching this television for so long that I figured I might as well have it," Rogers said. "I bought it off him (Quiton) so I could take it with me."

Shelly Tomlinson, a 23-year-old car saleswoman from Hawai'i Kai, has been coming to the pub every couple of weeks for the past five years. Yesterday, she worked her way through a Corona and a hot turkey sandwich plate with vegetables.

"I like to throw darts, play pool," Tomlinson said. "It's a nice place to hang out, and the food's good."

Like generations of other patrons, Tomlinson's father Wesley also used to hang out in the Elephant & Castle in his younger years, she said.

"He just told me that he liked to come here to shoot pool, too," Tomlinson said.

Quiton has been hearing similar stories from longtime customers who remembered coming into the pub as children and have been returning as adults with their own families.

But after he turned 60 years old on May 12, Quiton began feeling the pangs from an onset of diabetes and weighing the economics of staying open.

"At this point," Quiton said, "it just requires more obligation than I really want to be involved in."

So over the next few days, Quiton will begin wrapping up three decades of serving fish and chips and welcoming customers to "crudely elegant surroundings."

Then on Oct. 15, Quiton will watch as all of his restaurant equipment and the thousands of items he's collected over the years go up for auction inside the Elephant & Castle.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.