Some of the tables at Ming Teh are filled by people who crossed an international border to reach them. The restaurant sits on Niagara Boulevard in Fort Erie's Bridgeburg, on a stretch of the Niagara River that looks straight across the water to Buffalo, and a fair number of its regulars make exactly that drive — over the bridge from Western New York for Chinese food they can't get the same way at home. Siu Kui Cheung opened it in 1976 on the site of an old ferry dock, back when boats still carried passengers between the two shores, and the river has been part of the address ever since.
The kitchen's signature takes a day's notice. The Peking duck arrives in two courses and feeds four — skin and meat first with pancakes, the rest brought back from the wok — and the order has to go in a day ahead. The rest of the menu rewards a table that spreads out: Dry-Fried Beef Strips with ginger and garlic, Hot and Sour Fish Soup, steamed and fried dumplings, Moo Shu Pork, Deep-Fried Fish with Plum Sauce, Beef with Snow Pea Pods. Hot dishes are marked as such, and the kitchen will set them mild, medium, or hot to order. Two plates carry the house's stranger signatures — Fragrant Clouds, and Escargots with Pork in Garlic Sauce — the kind of thing regulars order to watch a first-timer's face.
What the menu says about the kitchen is that it never narrowed to a single calling card. Szechuan heat runs through it — the dry-fried beef, the hot-and-sour soups, the standing offer to push a dish hotter — but it sits inside a broader Chinese menu built for the way groups actually eat, plate after plate landing in the middle of the table. There is a local lineage here too: Fort Erie's riverfront once held a cluster of Chinese restaurants, names like May Wah and Happy Jack's, and Ming Teh is the one still cooking. The following from across the water came the slow way, one returned visit at a time.
The restaurant has stayed in family hands across a change of family. Cheung built it and ran it for years; today it is owned by Wendy Men and Mendel Men, named as the current owners in regional coverage of the restaurant's long run. The kitchen is led by a chef surnamed Men with more than three decades behind the wok and the Szechuan leaning the menu wears openly. Some of the founder's own artwork still hangs on the walls — a small inheritance from the first era that the current one never took down.
The setting does some of the work. The dining room looks out on the water, and tables turn over slowly — this is a place built for a group that wants to order a lot and stay a while, the portions large enough that a full table comes together out of dumplings, soup, a couple of seafood plates, noodles, and a duck without much strategy. Vegetarians get more than a token: steamed vegetable dumplings, stir-fried greens. Booking runs through the phone rather than an app, which suits a restaurant that has never needed to chase the way people find dinner.
The appeal was never novelty. It is a long table, a river out the window, and a kitchen that has made the same handful of things well enough that people plan around them — the duck reserved a day early, the heat set to taste, the drive over the bridge folded into the evening. Fort Erie holds a few minutes of riverfront where the view once meant a ferry crossing; Ming Teh is what stands on that ground now, still asking only that you call ahead for the duck.