A chef known in Dallas for his fine-dining background has turned his attention to wings at Proper Wing Kitchen & Bottleshop, a restaurant newly opened in Murphy that specializes in wings and craft beer.

Chef Jon Thompson is well known in Dallas foodie circles thanks to tenures at acclaimed restaurants such as José Andrés' Zaytinya in Frisco, Stampede 66, and Samar by Stephan Pyles. He also opened Sugarbacon in McKinney and helped open Miami-based Yardbird Southern Table and Bar, the Miami-based chain that debuted in downtown Dallas in 2020.

But Thompson says that despite a career in fine dining, he carried a torch for one of his favorite foods: buffalo wings. He's using his expertise in multiple global cuisines to take the wing game to new heights.

The menu includes chicken wings both bone-in and boneless; chicken tenders; and plant-based Beyond tenders. He's using the chef skills on an array of spice mixes and sauces that really do go around the world:

• Buffalo
• Adobo
• Gochujang BBQ
• Cherry stout BBQ
• Nashville hot butter
• Mango aji Amarillo
• Tikka masala

Dipping sauces include blue cheese, ranch, green gucci, creamy kimchi, comeback sauce, and creamy garlic harissa. Sauces being one of the key benchmarks by which a chef is measured.

He'll rotate flavors in and out, just as he'll rotate in and out their selection of beers.

"We're not doing beer on draft," he says. "We want to make things easy for takeout, so all of our beer is in bottles or cans. We have a drive-thru window although we cook our wings to order, so it's not something where you pull up and order from an outdoor menu. But if you call ahead, we can box it up and create a mix-and match of beers."

That said, there is in-house dining. They're located in a former Golden Chick at 305 FM 544, just east of east Plano, and it's a venture between Thompson and his wife Jocelyn, plus two longtime family friends.

Other fancy chef touches on the menu include making fries in-house, which star in the Loaded House Fries, topped with choice of chicken item, plus sauce, bacon, melted cheese, and pickled jalapeno.

Sides and salads include Asian slaw, Caesar salad, watermelon-mint salad, elotes, and a waffle, to be had solo or in the prototypical chicken & waffles combo.

"I'd been doing fine dining for a long time, and I was questioning whether I wanted to continue to do that when I began to kick around this idea," Thompson says. "We all love wings, and we all love beer, and it seemed like something that might be doable and fun."

Beyond the pragmatic element, he also saw that wings were an area where he could experiment and possible persuade diners to do the same.

"People seem willing to approach different flavors and sauces on wings, more than anywhere else," he says. "I'm doing all the big classic wing flavors like Buffalo, which I grew up eating, and we're doing our best to model our recipe after the original from Anchor Bar. So I hope that if people are impressed with that, they might move on to try something unusual like our Peruvian rotisserie or Moroccan spice mix."

"I'm hoping to get people to explore different cuisines," he says.