Iconic Gaithersburg café leaves behind memories. And ghosts?

Sean Aliakbar says he was laboring at his restaurant’s kitchen counter last week when something caught his attention.

“As soon as I turned over to finish cutting a sandwich and sending it out, the pan behind me just moved up and down,” said Aliakbar, whose family owns the Olde Towne Café in Gaithersburg.

“We believe in ghosts in here,” he said in an interview.

Sunday is the last day before the café — which Aliakbar’s family has run since 2000 in a rented, 177-year-old building with creaking stairs and a musty basement — closes due to what Aliakbar described as a lease disagreement with the new owners.

When it shuts down, he will haul out tables, chairs, fryers, refrigerators and dishes to be stored until the family opens a restaurant called OTC Kitchen & Social in Bethesda early next year.

He and his parents will leave behind a trove of unsorted relics, including old cash registers and liniments from when the building housed a pharmacy.

And ghosts?

“We hear stuff; we hear steps; we see stuff fall over,” Aliakbar said. “Doors open, close; hot sauce bottles fall over. So I’m sure there’s a lot of spirits here from our old customers, old patients and people that’s been here for over a couple hundred years.”

Stacy Miller, a regular customer, said she doesn’t know what to make of the ghost stories and isn’t eager to investigate.

To do that, she’d need to descend steep stairs into a dark basement filled with shelves of dusty pharmacy bottles and old prescription slips.

There is a bottle with a peeling label of sodium salicylate, a pain reliever used before aspirin became well established. There is a product in faded lettering called “Penresina,” used in adhesives.

The building opened in 1849, according to state land records. It’s in the Olde Towne section, which Gaithersburg officials hope to revitalize.

Miller, a research scientist who lives nearby, has never been to the basement but frequently sits at the counter for dinner, “and I’m here every Sunday morning,” for eggs, bacon and toast.

She will be there on the café’s last day. “I told Sean I don’t know where to go after that,” she said.

Another longtime regular, James Alderman, barely missed a day for decades. He died in September but is memorialized with a section of the menu featuring the words “James E. Alderman III” in oversized bold lettering.

It’s not certain what will become of the space when the Aliakbars leave.

The new owners, Andrew and Louis Courembis, did not immediately return email messages.

Aliakbar said he won’t leave all the historic items behind.

“We’ve got a phone booth that we’re actually going to take with us to Bethesda. It doesn’t work, but the phone and everything’s in it. And we’ll bring a lot of memories, man.”