Tom Fleming has news worth building a whole morning around. His sticky buns at Crossroads Diner in Plano are now on the menu six days a week instead of a rotating schedule, which means the thing regulars have been driving across town for no longer requires calling ahead to check.
That’s not a small deal if you know the history. Fleming opened the original Crossroads Diner in Dallas back in 2010, first on Walnut Hill Avenue and later on Preston Road, building a following on scratch-made comfort food from a chef who’d spent years in kitchens like Pappas Bros., Lombardi Mare, and Old Hickory Steakhouse at the Gaylord before deciding he’d rather flip pancakes and still make it home for bedtime. The Dallas location closed in November 2020, a casualty of the pandemic, five days short of its tenth anniversary. Fleming spent the next four years looking for the right spot to bring it back. He found it at Heritage Creekside in Plano, where Crossroads reopened in January 2025 with the same handwriting on the menu, just a different zip code.
The sticky bun is the reason people never really stopped talking about this place. It arrives caramelized and glossy, pecans pressed into the top, pulled apart in long ribbons that stay warm long enough to make you regret sharing. It’s not dainty. It’s built to anchor a table, the kind of thing you order first and then quietly reorder before the check comes.
Around it, the rest of the menu earns its keep. The chicken and waffles lean into a genuinely crisp fry rather than a soggy compromise, and the buttermilk pancakes hold up on their own without syrup doing all the work. The biscuits and black pepper gravy are peppery enough to notice, and the corned beef hash gets built from scratch rather than pulled from a can, which is rarer than it should be at a neighborhood diner. For something further from the standard breakfast lineup, the breakfast schnitzel and the frittata with chorizo, made with mozzarella from Paula Lambert’s Deep Ellum cheese factory, both make the case that Fleming’s fine-dining background never fully left the building.
Lunch holds its own too. The crispy fried chicken and warm brie sandwich is worth ordering on its own reputation, and the build-your-own burger option means the kitchen isn’t precious about customization. A roasted beet and blue cheese salad with toasted walnuts shows up seasonally and has quietly become one of the better reasons to stop in outside of breakfast hours.
Crossroads Diner is open Tuesday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., closed Mondays, at 645 Powell Lane in Plano’s Heritage Creekside development near Plano Parkway and Alma Road. Once daily service wraps for the day, Fleming told us the space doesn’t just go dark. The dining room opens up for private evening rentals, with a custom menu built around the occasion rather than a scaled-down version of the breakfast and lunch lineup. Fleming has taken that as far as plated filet and foie gras for the right event, so a rehearsal dinner or a corporate holiday party gets a kitchen capable of stepping well outside sticky bun territory when asked. More at crossroads-diner.com or on Instagram.
