Wrapchic has been open at Fishergate for a month.
The chain has been operating since 2012 when they opened their first branch in Birmingham city centre and they have since expanded at a reasonable rate.
One place they expanded was into the Bullring shopping centre, also in Birmingham, which is where I tried Wrapchic for the first time in 2015. The idea, initially, struck me as genius and I recall thinking that it would be very successful if it came to Preston.
And now here we are.
The reason for my expectations being high are simple. I eat a lot of burritos. I eat a lot of Indian food. And the headline act here is the menu of burritos with Indian fillings. On paper, it’s ideal. In practice, it’s less effective than you would hope.
We head to Wrapchic on a Saturday afternoon. The style and decor of the place is suitably modern and well-lit. You can get your food to go or you can sit and eat – it’s the sort of place you’d be happy to eat at and a step-up from your usual fast food setting.
The staff are immediately friendly and helpful, but it’s something of a disappointment when we hear they have no regular burritos or rice bowls left. This would seem like a sign of popularity if the place wasn’t empty at the time.
We get around this by ordering a small burrito each and a wraposa (I’ll explain later) to share.
More: New Indian street food takeaway opening in Preston
You have a decent choice of filling for your burrito. If you want the standard chicken or mutton options, that’s fine. But impressively, you can also have a soya option which will please the vegans out there who are sick of being short-changed by some chains.
The small burrito (£4.50) is predictably a little small but the flavour is pleasant enough without really blowing my mind. I order mutton madrasi, a south Indian blend of spices, while my dining partner goes for chicken methi. Both of us clean our plates in quick time, but it’s lacking something and it’s a little bland (which Indian food should never be) Unlike many burrito places, there’s no option to customise what goes in there as you order and that would be very welcome.
So that wraposa? The name indicates that this is going to be somewhere in between a wrap and a samosa but this couldn’t be further from the truth. What we instead received was lukewarm filling on toasted bread. It resembles neither a wrap nor a samosa. It’s a dull and uninspired end product combined with some clever marketing. It’s only ever going to disappoint when it could quite easily be a success if it delivered as it seems to promise (£2.60).
Ultimately, the Wrapchic experience fails to live up to what is a fantastic idea. This should be a no-brainer, but the main product doesn’t live up to what some of the competition can offer and the lack of care taken over the wraposa product felt a touch embarrassing.
A good burrito place would absolutely thrive in Preston and a good Indian street food place would do the same. Wrapchic has a little bit of work to do to fulfil either criteria.
Atmosphere: 7/10
Service: 7/10
Value: 7/10
Food: 4/10
Total: 25/40
Our food reviewers pay for themselves and aren’t invited by the venue, if we are we will always say in the review.