In February 2016, Isaac and Lauren Hadley spent what savings they had on an old ambulance. They hauled it into Isaac’s parents’ backyard, stripped it down, and repainted it into something that no longer looked like it belonged to a hospital. What came out the other end was a food truck, and what it served was Hawaiian-style shrimp plates built on flavors the Hadleys had picked up during four years at BYU-Hawaii, where they’d fallen for the shrimp trucks lining Oahu’s North Shore.
That truck became Coco Shrimp, and on August 10, the brand opened its first restaurant inside Dallas city limits at 2525 Wycliff Avenue, a decade after it started as two newlyweds and a converted ambulance.
The growth in between wasn’t fast so much as steady. Isaac’s sister Mary and her husband Jordan Barrus joined the business in the summer of 2016, with Jordan leaving a corporate job in San Clemente to help run the truck full time. By 2018 the original rig had been swapped for a second, sturdier version, one built to survive the wait times that were already stretching past ninety minutes on busy days. The first brick-and-mortar location opened in downtown Fort Worth on Bryan Avenue in December 2019, inside an old building the Hadleys gutted and rebuilt themselves.
Three months later the pandemic hit, and Coco Shrimp grew through it anyway, opening a second Fort Worth location on Heritage Trace Boulevard in June 2021…