QUEBEC'S CONTRIBUTION to the junk-food arts has been on a tear of late. You can find poutine—french fries and nuggets of curd cheese smothered in gravy—at New York hot spots like Fatty 'Cue and M. Wells Steakhouse. It has invaded menus from Miami to San Diego; Chicago kicked off an annual poutine festival last year.

But is poutine better in its homeland? And more important: Is there even such a thing as a great poutine?

Those questions occurred to me during poutine week in Montreal, where chefs were judged on their attempts to enhance the dish's foundational triumvirate. Offerings included a version with Indian butter chicken; a coffee-and-doughnuts poutine (potato doughnuts, red-eye gravy); seal-meat poutine; poutine-covered pizzas; even a Japanese seafood "disaster" poutine. The winner: the General Tao poutine from an establishment called Poutineville.

Poutine variations are certainly crazier in Quebec than anywhere else. They're also often pricier, given the added ingredients. The problem with aiming to make poutine fancy is that the dish is meant to be trashy. Trying to improve it is like adding a penthouse to a mobile home. Poutine only makes sense at the end of a drunken revel, after playing outdoor winter sports or on a road trip—ideally through rural Quebec, the concoction's birthplace.

Two towns claim to have invented poutine in the 1950s or 1960s. The first is Warwick, where a customer supposedly asked fry cook Fernand Lachance to mix fries, curds, ketchup and vinegar in a wax-paper bag and shake it up. When the contents exploded all over his counter, Mr. Lachance deemed it a "maudite poutine"—a blasted mess. The other creation myth, centered around an extant diner called Le Roy Jucep in Drummondville, traces the etymology back to the English "pudding," transliterated into pouding, which was combined with Ti-Pout, a line chef's nickname, to become poutine.