Coco's Soul Food review: sun, sea, sand, Bob Marley, and sampling Preston's take on the famous Cajun cuisine

When you’re eating soul food, you’re in search of a full stomach and an experience which is going to fill another gap you didn’t even know needed patching.

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With that in mind, I decided to head out to Preston’s very own purveyors of such culinary offerings - Coco’s Soul Food on Friargate. With their jaunty website claiming that ‘we believe that a meal needs to do more than feed your body - it should feed your soul too,’ I was very optimistic. 

Inside, a wonderfully colourful world of Caribbean murals and bright hues greeted me, with themes of sun, sea, sand, and Bob Marley ever-present. The menu was stocked full of spices, jerk chicken, Cajun marinades, BBQ this-and-that, fried chicken, and a hot sauce called Slap Yo Mama. It looked brilliant. 

WATCH: Watch our video review of Preston's take on classic Cajun cooking at Coco's Soul Food on Friargate

I decided on the Soul Burger, described as containing ‘2 homemade beef patties topped with hickory BBQ roast lamb, 3 cheeses & 3 secret sauces with salad.’ At £8, it wasn’t a cheap lunch, and it didn’t even feature accompanying fries or some other side, but the allure of roast lamb and secret sauces had me hook, line, and sinker.

When it arrived, I found it to be… just okay. It was a relatively hefty burger, with a good amount of salad and sauce. The bread was cheap and cheerful - no one orders a burger for the bread, granted - and the cheese on it had that plasticky sheen which most people sniff at whilst secretly quite liking it. 

The burgers themselves were a little disappointing. Slightly dry and not really bringing much to the meal besides just being there, they were simply fine - they tasted of beef and that’s pretty much all there is to say about them. Similarly, the lamb was a little bit of a let down - I was picturing soft sticky tender meat piled on in a sweet BBQ sauce, but what greeted me instead were slightly fatty strips of lamb cooked with a BBQ glaze.

I’m starting to think that I ordered the wrong thing - plenty of other punters in the restaurant looked very pleased indeed with their meals, tucking in to generous mounds of fried this and BBQ that. Maybe I’ll have to give it another go in pursuit of something to take my taste buds on ‘a trip around the world’, because this burger left them firmly grounded in Preston.