One kid who frequented the Salem Street Soda Shop always ordered a hot dog topped with peanut butter.

So that’s what he got, even though it wasn’t on the menu, and it’s those personal touches dished out by the downtown Apex eatery that patrons will miss most.

Wednesday, April 9 was the last day of business for the soda fountained-styled restaurant, one of the main stays in the town’s revitalized core.

“I don’t know I’ll find something that’s not 96 hours a week,” Wade Baker, the shop’s owner, joked about his future prospects over the bustling sounds of a packed lunch shift.

He's closing the business partly because of the long hours. "And it's time for a change," said Baker who noted that whatever job he takes next he hopes to be working for somebody else so he doesn't have to "take it home at night."

Baker, 51, opened the restaurant at 113 N. Salem St. in 1999 in a renovated building that had housed his family’s laundry business.

By transient Triangle standards, Baker is old school.

Fourth-generation Apex, he jerked sodas in a downtown drug store during his teens.

In the late 1990s, as he sat watching the town’s population surge, he thought the concept could work again.

A large crowd filtered through the place today to pay their respects, and order some grilled cheese and fried bologna sandwiched.

Stepping into Baker’s soda shop was like stepping into the 1950s. A black-and-while checkered floor sat beneath wooden booths where people shouted familiar greetings across the room.

“I was born and raised in places like this,” said Erv Evans, 79, there for lunch with his grandkids Savannah, 11, and Christian, 13.

Though reminiscent of the past — there was even a display case for historical Apex memorabilia — the shop also spoke of the future, since many of its patrons came from the transplanted masses swelling Apex’s numbers.

Since the restaurant was open for three meals Monday through Saturday, 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., different shifts of people took it over at different times of the day, said shop regular Frank Barden.

At around 3:30 p.m. for example school kids took over the place, Barden said as he sat at the shop’s counter during the lunch shift.

Of course throughout any day at the restaurant you might have also seen the police chief or a government official or two, or Barden himself who came “more than once a day three or four times a week.”

Barden doesn’t know where he’ll eat lunch now, maybe home, but he knows that he’ll miss Salem Street.

It was a short walk to the soda shop, just a few steps from Barden’s downtown computer business; the prices were reasonable, just $4.35 for a barbeque sandwich and $4.50 for a cheeseburger.

Mostly though Barden will miss seeing Baker every day, a guy who knew everybody and managed to create an old-fashioned hangout where all of new Apex could come to meet.

Baker said that a South Carolina company has bought the building and its equipment. They’ll run a restaurant, but he’s not sure what kind.