Flying Saucer Restaurant

Coming up Lundy's Lane in Niagara Falls, you see it before you can read the sign: two metal flying saucers stacked at the roadside, domes lit, unmistakable from a moving car. Flying Saucer Restaurant could coast on that silhouette alone, and plenty of theme restaurants would. This one doesn't. The building was dreamed up by a science-fiction obsessive, and the kitchen behind it has spent more than five decades cooking like a real diner rather than a photo op. The novelty gets you through the door; the breakfast, served well past noon, is the part regulars actually plan around.

Breakfast is the strongest stretch of the day, and it runs long. The house specialty is Steak and Three Eggs — an eight-ounce New York strip with three eggs, home fries and Texas toast, with a larger cut available for a bigger appetite. Classic UFO Crepes carry the theme onto the morning menu, folded around apple cinnamon, mixed berry, or Nutella and banana and finished with homemade cream cheese. There are buttermilk and blueberry pancakes, a Waffle Deluxe with egg and a choice of meat, Eggs Benedict and Eggs Florentine, the Great Canadian Omelette, and the loaded E.T. Special — two pancakes, three eggs, sausage, bacon, home fries and Texas toast for anyone who wants the whole table on one plate.

The rest of the day spreads just as wide. Saucer Fries arrive buried under homemade spicy meat sauce, the single order that best turns the gag into something you can eat, with Supreme Fries piling on cheddar and mozzarella for a little more. From there it is Jupiter and Saucer burgers, a Great Canadian triple-patty, foot-long dogs, wings that run from honey garlic to suicide, the Cosmic Finger Combo, an Italian Hot Sausage Sub built on homemade pork sausage, a Steak Sub Supreme on toasted ciabatta, and a two-piece haddock Fish n Chip Dinner with homemade tartar sauce and coleslaw. Even the starters keep the broad-appeal logic, from chicken fingers to Buffalo cauliflower bites.

What holds all of it together is the discipline of the joke. The space-age language never stops at the front door — it runs through the order, from Saucer Fries to UFO crepes to a burger named for Jupiter, so the theme stays live at the table instead of fading the moment you sit. Underneath the costume is an ordinary, useful promise: big plates at low prices. Every morning carries an Early Bird Breakfast Special from six to ten, the standing kind of value that turns a tourist's curiosity into a regular's habit. The restaurant puts the whole idea on its own sign — out-of-this-world food at down-to-earth prices.

The backstory is not decoration either. The original Flying Saucer began with Henry Di Cienzo, whose fascination with science fiction turned a Lundy's Lane drive-in into a UFO, and the restaurant has stood on that lane since 1972. By the family's account, the first saucer did well enough to grow into a full dining room, and a second saucer was added later — the twin domes that shape the building today — to seat more diners and take on a steady take-out and delivery trade that the kitchen still runs alongside the dining room.

That history is why the place reads differently depending on who walks in. For a family building a day around the Falls, the domes are part of the meal, something for kids to react to before the food lands. For visitors who would rather eat where residents do, Lundy's Lane sits a comfortable distance off the tourist core. For locals, it is a cheap breakfast, a take-out order, a late-night plate of wings after the strip empties out. The saucers have looked the same since 1972, and on a full Saturday the booths underneath them still turn over plates of Saucer Fries to kids who came for the spaceship and stayed for the meat sauce.