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.
From there it kept moving east: Watauga in late 2021, Denton in October 2022, an expanded kitchen and dining room back at the original Bryan Avenue spot in 2023, then Richardson and Plano in 2024 as the brand pushed toward Dallas proper for the first time. Keller followed that same year, and in November 2024 Coco Shrimp opened its first location outside DFW altogether, near the Texas A&M campus in College Station. Mansfield came in September 2025, Wylie in February 2026, and now Wycliff Avenue makes eleven locations total and the first one that can claim a Dallas address rather than a suburb around it.
The building has a past of its own. It’s a full remodel of a space that used to house a Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, reworked into roughly 2,200 square feet of dining room and counter service, according to permits filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
The menu hasn’t grown much even as the map has. It is still built around one idea: shrimp, rice, and salad, with a handful of ways to dress it up. The Coco Shrimp ($12.50) is the namesake plate, six hand-battered shrimp fried in sweet coconut flakes with a side of sweet chili sauce. Sweet & Spicy ($12.50) drizzles that same coconut shrimp in teriyaki and a house-made spicy sauce. For anyone who wants the shrimp without the fried coating, there’s Butter Garlic ($11.95), Spicy Shrimp ($11.95), and Lemon Herb ($11.95), all sauteed rather than battered.
The Sampler Plate ($12.95) covers indecision with three flavors and seven shrimp on one plate, and the Coco Tacos ($9.95) tuck the same shrimp into a flour tortilla with cilantro-lime dressing and sweet chili sauce. A Keiki Plate ($7) handles the kids’ menu, three shrimp of any flavor with a small rice and salad.
Add-ons lean into the Hawaiian theme without overcomplicating it: toasted coconut flakes, sliced avocado, grilled pineapple, crushed macadamia nuts. Dessert is mochi ice cream, when the location has it in stock.
Coco Shrimp Wycliff is open Monday through Thursday from 10:45 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 10:45 a.m. to 10 p.m., and closed Sundays. The number is (214) 484-1378, and the full menu and online ordering are at cocoshrimp.com.
Fort Worth got the ambulance-turned-food-truck first, then the first ten restaurants that followed it. Dallas is only now getting a seat at the table, but the menu hasn’t changed to mark the occasion.
