Poutine Fries Over Chicken Fried Steak at Maple Leaf Diner

If you ask anybody where to find Canadian comfort fare in this city, trust us, it won’t be long before a certain Dallas diner pops up. Odds are it’ll get the first mention.

Maple Leaf Diner has been the consummate Canadian fare destination in town for almost a decade. Since owners Michael Delaurier and his aunt, Debra Delaurier, founded Maple Leaf Diner in 2015 (Michael bought out Debra in 2018) it's been featured on TV numerous times both locally and nationally. Paula Deen Magazine cited this Canuck eatery as having one of the top 10 chicken and waffle dishes nationally.
Located in Preston Valley Shopping Center (Preston Road and I-635), Maple Leaf Diner is a brunch-focused haven that cranks out a smörgåsbord of classic Canadian-American breakfast and lunch dishes with machine-like efficiency. And the generous portion sizes are one of the key reasons this diner has generated so much acclaim over the years.

All the hype it has received over the years brings the crowds. Big crowds. This spot stays bustling. Arrive at peak hours, and it’s not a matter of whether there’s going to be a wait, but how long. We arrived on a recent Sunday well after peak brunch and still had to wait outside 20 minutes for a table.

The menu here is vast, but we’re going to go out on a limb and guess the reason most first-timers are drawn through the doors of Maple Leaf Diner is for the poutine, Canada’s iconic brown gravy-drenched French fries and cheese curds dish. We were going to go with a half-order of poutine until we realized we could get it over chicken fried steak ($17.99). Sure, it probably upped our odds of a coronary by 5%, but YOLO.

When it arrived, you could barely see that there was indeed a chicken fried steak somewhere shrouded in all that glorious poutine. There are a lot of great hangover dishes out there, but this whopper of a dish has to be somewhere in the top five of all-time bests.

Next, we went with another famous Maple Leaf menu item, the pizza burger ($13.49), which was once showcased on the Travel Channel's Food Paradise. This creation comes topped with a Bolognese sauce, pepperoni, bacon, banana and bell peppers and breaded mushrooms, and it's served with a side of marinara. Did we forget to mention the mini-brick of fried mozzarella? Yeah, it has one of those, too. And it is a burger, so somewhere among all that, you’ll find a fat, juicy beef patty cooked to order. Like we alluded to earlier, this place isn’t shy about excess.
Even though we'd already ingested several thousand calories, menu, we couldn’t leave without getting at least one item from Maple Leaf Diner's renowned breakfast menu. We ultimately settled on Canadian eggs Benedict ($12.99), an English muffin topped with Canadian bacon, a pair of beautifully poached eggs with fresh dill and smothered in hollandaise. This dish, while not nearly as brash as the chicken fried steak poutine or pizza burger, in an understated way, was possibly our favorite of the three. It was superb.
With its 10-year anniversary in sight, Dallas’ flagship Canadian diner is still thriving. What Michael and Debra Delaurier created here is impressive. The still-buzzing dining room (which got a makeover a couple of years ago) and the lines out the door are proof.

12817 Preston Road, No. 129. Monday – Friday, 7 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.; Saturday – Sunday, 7 a.m. – 4 p.m.