We explore the role of a holographic Wilsonian cut-off in simple probe brane models with chiral symmetry breaking/restoration phase transitions. The Wilsonian cut-off allows us to define supergravity solutions for off-shell configurations and hence to define a potential for the chiral condensate. We pay particular attention to the need for configurations whose action we are comparing to have the same IR and UV boundary conditions. We exhibit new first and second order phase transitions with changing cut-off. We derive the effective potential for the condensate including mean field and BKT type continuous transitions.

14 pages, 16 figures, v2: Added references, corrected typos, v3: minor corrections, the version to appear in PRD