IT’S almost three on a Monday afternoon and Pastor Christopher Morgan is seated at the food court in the Sovereign Centre in St Andrew. Every so often he breaks his conversation to greet what appears to be a never-ending line of diners on their way to his food establishment, WingKing, situated to the rear of our seating area.

One of the customers, a student, approached the cashier. Before she made her order, Morgan correctly predicts what it would be.

After all, it is in Morgan’s friendly persona and his culinary mastery, that lies the genesis of WingKing, which has, in no time, exploded onto the local fast-food scene.

On Christmas Eve of 2009, about 20 friends and members of Morgan’s Go for God Family Church, gathered at his Barbican home in St Andrew on an invitation to ‘hang’ and have a meal. For his guests, Morgan prepared ginger, garlic parmesan and lemon-pepper chicken wings. To their surprise, their pastor and friend was not only gifted spiritually but also had a golden touch when it came to food preparation.

“They just absolutely loved it,” he tells Sunday Finance. “They loved it so much that I did it the week after that on New Year’s Eve, and the following week.”

From that single fellowship on Christmas Eve, the numbers exploded to where Morgan was hosting up to 50 persons each week. And as word got around, he found himself each Friday catering to hundreds of diners for his assortment of chicken wings, which by this time included the now flagship guava jerk flavour and strawberry barbecue.

“I had to start charging and I had to start buying tents and chairs because we started to have a couple hundreds of persons coming to my house every week,” says Morgan.

He even employed a couple bikers to start delivering his chicken wings to customers in the Corporate Area.

Morgan soon began printing and distributing flyers with the consequence being that a once weekly gathering was not sufficient. It became so popular, he had to hire security and had to extend it to Saturdays.

“I gave out flyers twice – about 300 flyers at Loshusan Supermarket one week, and the next week again about 300 flyers,” he says.

“After that, I could not promote anymore, we were ‘dying’ on a Friday night… We immediately jumped from doing hundreds to thousands; it was so crazy that I had to start opening on Saturdays as well.”

Saturday’s cuisine included additional items such as mini burgers and macaroni & cheese balls, of which the latter is still a popular menu option today at WingKing.

So, after four months of operating out of his home, Morgan asked himself the question which would lead to his venture’s inevitable transition into a formal commercial enterprise.

“Eventually, I said, ‘Boy, I have to start to do something’. My question was now, how do you turn a huge demand-driven phenomenon into a commercial venture?” Morgan recounts.

The answer was to invest $2.5 million last year into this outlet at the high traffic Sovereign Centre.

The upshot for WingKing is that it has moved from having a niche, cult-like following to a diverse customer base; its point of sale has moved from a residential area in Barbican to a commercial area in Liguanea; its source of supply has made leaps from supermarkets to wholesalers to poultry-producing giant Jamaica Broilers; and what was once a one-man operation now employs 16.

By any standard, Morgan, the son of a preacher, Peter Morgan, has attained great success, given the fact that he had never attended culinary classes, as much as he wanted to.

Not that he wasn’t content with just being a pastor. For years, he watched his family — Morgan’s brothers, Peter Jr and Colin, are both pastors, and his mother, Dr Patricia Morgan, is an educational psychologist — empower the less fortunate in some of Kingston’s most depressed communities, and he too was determined in his heart to help the poor. So, he was ordained a pastor in 2004 and launched his own church, the Go for God Family Church, at the Shortwood Teachers’ College auditorium in 2009.

Now that Morgan owns his own full-fledged chicken wing restaurant with his wife, Marsha — living a dream, it could be appropriately called.

“I’ve always loved chicken wings and always had a dream of having a finger food restaurant,” Morgan shares.

Aside from dine-in and take-out customers, a huge chunk of WingKing’s revenue stream comes from catering contracts.

“One of the big things that have happened to me since I started advertising in the newspaper is that I started to get lots of catering calls. I’m talking thousands of chicken wings through corporations, from the small executive board meetings to big parties,” he tells Sunday Finance.

Indeed, Morgan is proving that there are great opportunities out there for small entrepreneurs, even in a recession.

“There’s nobody set up to do [just] chicken wings and we are by far the industry leaders. What we were able to do, the way we season and sort out our chicken, the people just love it,” says Morgan, explaining to this newspaper that his mix of some 16 sauces is a major part of WingKing’s popularity. “The sauce quality is top class. It really is truly gourmet.”

With phenomenal success, the natural move to make is to expand, which Morgan has set out to do with a recent multi-million dollar investment to establish another WingKing outlet at the Oaklands Plaza along Constant Spring Road in St Andrew. This outlet, Morgan hopes, may be opened in time for the Observer’s annual Food Awards in May.

“We were really being pressed to open another location,” Morgan concedes.

With the opening of this new branch comes a new produce, boneless chicken wings, which he hopes will put chick sale on the level of his sought-after sauces. And he has a new aspiration — to sell a million wings by the end of the year.

“Last year, the goal was to sell 200,000 and this year,” says Morgan, “we want to do a million… The fact that we are opening another store, we should be able to do it.”

“People really buy our food for the sauces now, but boneless chicken wings are going to be the next big thing,” he predicts.

Now, while moving full speed ahead, Morgan can only reminisce about when it was all a dream. “How do you make a dream into a sustainable reality?” he asks, striking a tone of accomplishment.