This Nondescript Donut Shop's Wonton Soup Has a Ridiculous Following

The combination of Chinese food and doughnuts is nothing unusual for West Coasters, as a confused writer for The Atlantic once discovered after touching down in Los Angeles. Many Chinese and Cambodian shop owners combine these seemingly disparate cuisines as a way to continue business into the afternoon and evening after the initial morning doughnut rush.

California, especially, is peppered with places that serve both, or some other disjointed combination of cuisines: Chinese food and Hawaiian barbecue, like in Santa Clara's King Chopstick; or, Hawaiian barbecue and doughnuts, such as in nearby San Jose's Daily Donuts 2. And it seems like every small- to mid-sized town in America has a slightly less strange iteration: the sushi place that also serves egg rolls, or pad Thai. It's ubiquitous enough to be the butt of internet jokes.

Still, if you had to guess where to get the best wonton soup in your city—or any city, for that matter—you'd probably start your mental Rolodex with a super-authentic Chinese restaurant, maybe working your way down through your local dim sum palaces and favorite takeout joints. But you probably wouldn't immediately point to a very American- (or Canadian-) looking corner doughnut shop. Unless you lived in Niagara Falls, Ontario, that is.

The collective Niagara Falls area is absolutely obsessed with the wonton soup at Country Fresh Donuts, a quaint—if dated—little doughnut shop in the town of 83,000 (133,000 if you include the residents of Niagara Falls, NY, just over the river). There, the soup is a Seinfeldian sensation; every seat is occupied with soup-eaters almost around the clock, with lines often forming at the crack of dawn. One could comfortably venture to describe its following as an addiction, actually, and one that left the entire town in withdrawals for the past seven months.

In April, an out-of-control car crashed into Country Fresh Donuts' storefront in the middle of the night, causing major damage to the building's interior. It took more than half a year for store owners John and Mary Tu to file an insurance claim and make the necessary repairs to get the place back on its feet. During that time, the owners were continuously approached by fiending customers who were pleading for a wonton soup revival. Essentially, they didn't even know the value of what they had—hot, savory broth; elegantly seasoned, hand-made dumplings; a perfectly measured sprinkle of scallions and portion of barbecue pork on top—until it was torn from their clutches. And the recipe's a family secret, so there was no chance of trying to make it at home.

Messages on the shop's Facebook and Trip Advisor pages begged for its swift return. "When's it reopening up? I need my wontons!"; "Really missin' the wonton soup—nobody makes it like you"; "Waiting impatiently for my favourite bowl of wonton soup"; they read by the dozens. Another soup on the menu with barbecue pork, noodles, and bok choy also gets some love, but nothing comparable to the fanaticism over its wonton counterpart.

When the shop finally reopened on Wednesday to a Black Friday-esque torrent of spiral-eyed soup-seekers, a line snaked out of the 24-hour-shop's doors and onto the street before it was even 5 AM. For a small town on the Canadian border, they put New York City's notoriously ridiculous Cronut line to shame.

One man, Rick Schaubel, has been making a pilgrimage to the wonton soup Mecca every day for the past 23 years. "[The soup] was greatly missed," he told news channel CHCH on Wednesday, "and it was so exciting when we found that it was reopening up."

In New York, you'll find fairly authentic Caribbean food hidden in pizzerias, and in Mumbai, you can find minestrone and mutter paneer under the same roof at a handful of Indian/Italian crossover spots. In New Zealand, you'll even find Chinese Malay cuisine served at Da Vinci's Pizzeria. Elsewhere around the world, it's slightly less common but certainly not unheard of for restaurants to combine styles of cuisine in one kitchen, often to appeal to diverse tourist palates. In Hong Kong, you'll find Preggio, which serves Italian food and "waffle afternoon tea sets," and Victoria Noodle, where you'll find much more than chow mein, despite its simplistic name. The seemingly endless menu there also offers borscht, spaghetti, omelettes, curry, and lunch meat sandwiches. But who knows—maybe their borscht is a slam dunk, their equivalent to Country Fresh's wonton legend (though there don't seem to be lines out the door for it).

In Niagara Falls, Country Fresh Donuts is something of an anomaly. It's something of a quirky jewel; the rare combo-cuisine joint that has had its lesser-advertised options overtake its facade. There are no other doughnut shops in the town that also offer Asian cuisine, over the bridge on the New York side of the city, there is Frankie's Donuts, which also serves pizza—possibly the most failsafe food in North America. But locals instead flock to Country Fresh, because there's just something about that wonton soup.

The doughnuts are supposedly pretty decent, too.