He's NOT Here

Order a beef on weck at He's NOT Here and the sandwich points straight across the Niagara River to Buffalo, a few minutes and one border crossing away; order the crab cakes and they arrive over baby greens with a pineapple curry for dipping. Between those two plates sit a Sicilian soup, wings by the pound, and a truffle-centred mac-and-cheese fritter. This is a young riverfront pub on Fort Erie's Niagara Boulevard, opened in 2024, and its menu refuses to settle into a single lane.

The list leads with things built in the kitchen rather than pulled from a freezer. The Roast Beef on Kummelweck is slow-roasted in house, then piled on the caraway-and-salt kummelweck roll with fries, coleslaw, and horseradish — a Western New York sandwich rendered on the Canadian side of the river. The Bowl of Love arrives as hand-rolled meatballs in homemade sauce baked under mozzarella. A grilled Italian sausage comes sautéed with peppers, mushrooms, and onions under the same cheese. Truffle Fritter Mac and Cheese lands as crisp golden fritters with a creamy centre and a side of cheese sauce. Wings run a full sauce range, from Honey Garlic and Chili Thai to Cajun and BBQ Jerk. And the seafood is more ambitious than a pub needs to be: coconut shrimp fried gold and set against pineapple curry, crab cakes over greens, calamari dusted and fried with tzatziki alongside.

What that menu says is that the kitchen is doing more than its price band asks of it. An inexpensive pub could stop at burgers and pizza, and He's NOT Here plates both — a six-ounce burger with the usual dress, pizzas that run from cheese-and-pepperoni to buffalo chicken and steak-and-cheese. The chicken alone runs three ways: a crispy sandwich, buffalo tenders stacked with bacon and blue cheese, a Philly piled with peppers and onions under mozzarella. But the same page slow-roasts its own beef, hand-rolls a trio-mix meatball, folds truffle into a fritter, and simmers a Pasta Fagioli on the Sicilian template with beans, herbs, Parmesan, and Romano. The reach toward Buffalo at one end and the Mediterranean at the other is not confusion. It is a border-town kitchen cooking for a crowd that has always eaten across the line.

The setting earns the longer visit. The dining room sits on Niagara Boulevard in Fort Erie's Bridgeburg quarter, the river in front of it, worked in nautical decor and a rustic-modern finish around a stylish bar. Past the beer there are separate wine and martini-cocktail lists, live music on the calendar, and a patio for the warm months when the water is the view. It works as easily for a group spreading nachos, wings, and fritters across the middle of a table as it does for a quick order at the bar. Hours stretch late into the weekend — eleven on Friday, midnight on Saturday — which is when a comfort-food pub tips from a lunch counter into a night out. Mondays are dark; the rest of the week runs lunch through dinner, with takeout heading out the door for the tables that never sit down.

For a place barely off the ground, He's NOT Here has already decided to cook wider than its category. The name keeps it coy; the kitchen does not. Beef roasted for the weck, meatballs rolled by hand, shrimp met with pineapple curry — it is a lot of range for a young pub on a quiet stretch of border boulevard, and it is range a table settles into rather than orders around. On a Saturday the river goes dark out front while the bar stays lit behind the glass, and the kitchen keeps sending plates until the night runs out.