Restaurant review: Put The Front Room on the back burner

by Katie & Emily Garrett of The Dish On Dallas

Hotel Lumen's restaurant menu looks deliciously unique, but fails to impress with the taste buds.

Photo by Katie & Emily Garrett

Edamame hummus served with fresh vegetables at The Front Room, inside Hotel Lumen

DALLAS — After reading some positive reviews on The Front Room, we decided to give it a try. Located in the Hotel Lumen, a very trendy and sleek restaurant greets patrons. A noon lunch found the place mostly vacant (except for a celebrity chef sighting of Tiffany Derry), but that changed as our lunch progressed.When we talked with our waitress about business, she revealed that lunch was usually touch and go, but dinner service was pretty solid -- even moving into wait list territory.

The menu looked delicious, and there were very few things that we didn't want to try.

We started with the edamame hummus.

Our waitress murmured a "good choice" before taking our order off to the kitchen.

When the dish came, we found it a little bitter with a heavy handed use of both garlic and cumin. While we did appreciate the use of steamed and fresh vegetables, particularly the broccolini, I think the dish would've been enhanced with a cracker/lavash option.

With the other choices on the appetizer menu, we wouldn't order this again.

Photo by Katie & Emily Garrett

Macaroni and cheese (front) and the grilled cheese (back) from The Front Room

For lunch, we had the macaroni and cheese and the grilled cheese.

We loved the choices of serving pieces. We did not love the food itself.

The macaroni and cheese was tepid, temperature-wise. When something comes out in a cast iron skillet dish, you have certain expectations about heat. We were misled. As to the food itself, very bland. Even with salt, we weren't impressed. We weren't even sure if there was actually cheese in our mac and cheese.

The grilled cheese didn't offer us much more. Again, the temperature was luke warm, leaving the cheese a little less than desirable. A mix of cheeses, including Boursin, this grilled cheese had such potential. Instead, one side of our sandwich was almost burned and the other side was a nice and toasty golden brown.

We can do that at home, thank you.

All in all, we wanted so much more from The Front Room. It has a lot of potential, but it did not impress us.