The restaurant is situated in a Santa Ana industrial complex surrounded by sprawling concrete buildings, in the sort of center where you’d expect to find a post office, a cleaners and maybe a chain restaurant that pushes build-your-own poke bowls.
You walk through the front door of Darkroom and it’s as if you’ve leapt into another dimension.
The dining room, as the name suggests, is dim enough to develop a roll of film at your table, or at the very least blur the edges of your date like a real-life filter.
The sensation of light being sucked from your aura like a black hole is intentional, and your first introduction to the wild, whimsical mind of chef and owner Zach Scherer.
Imagine your cool friend from college, the one with really good taste in music, throwing a dinner party where the vibes are consistently immaculate. A dim red glow sets the mood, and the staff provides the soundtrack, plucking from a wall of vinyl that includes around 800 records. During the course of one dinner, you might hear the entirety of an alt-J album followed by Van Halen’s “Jump,” “Pretty Piece of Flesh” from One Inch Punch and Des’ree’s “I’m Kissing You.”
The menu is as unpredictable as the music, zigzagging between Asian, Mediterranean and Latin influences before skidding to a stop at dessert. And it will likely change with each visit.
During my first dinner, meaty olives were stuffed with anchovy and merguez, battered and fried like Scotch eggs and served over smeared labneh with a sprinkle of sumac. A pile of calamari played second fiddle to a garnish of braised cabbage cooked like sweet and slack caramelized onions. Gnocchi was fashioned out of nuggets of pâte à choux dough, grainy like prized clumps of cream of wheat, in a rich turnip sauce brightened with lemon zest.
If you’re experiencing menu fatigue, weary of the parkerhouse rolls, gem lettuce salads and crudo at just about every “small plates” restaurant in town, consider Darkroom the antidote.
The Nashville hot swordfish is organized chaos on a plate, with fillet of swordfish coated in almond flour and potato starch and pan-fried until the center is firm and succulent. The hot sauce is made with Calabrian chiles, red wine vinegar, butter and a little cayenne, giving the dish a little smoke and must without any real heat. Spilled over the top is a sauce gribiche, like deviled eggs deliquesced into an extra herbaceous tartar sauce. A fresh salad made from sliced onion, pickles and plenty of dill marinated in shirodashi is scattered over the top. The more stuff you can fit on your fork, the greater the reward.
Most of the dishes are vaguely nostalgic but infused with Scherer’s distinct sensibility.
He sous-vides hanger steak at 130 degrees for 24 hours, then grills it to order. It’s dipped in koji butter and plated alongside a mound of creamed Bloomsdale spinach cooked down with miso, shirodashi, verjus and cream. It’s the recognizable steakhouse plate given the Darkroom treatment, rendering the most tender iteration of the hanging tenderloin and a creamed spinach blasted with umami. The steak and spinach sit in a vermouth-based demi-glace that coats the plate in an ultra meaty glaze. Then he dresses the steak with a chili crisp that gets its crunch from buckwheat and sesame seeds fried with Aleppo pepper and mushroom bouillon.
“I wanted to make something that I felt didn’t exist in Orange County,” he says. “I built a restaurant that I wanted to hang out at, with music and food being front and center.”
The music school dropout quit when he realized music theory would not turn him into a rock star. But his creative streak fueled him through a stint at culinary school in Las Vegas. He returned to California and launched a food truck. Most notably, he was the chef de cuisine at Jason Quinn’s Playground, the now-shuttered California gastropub in Santa Ana that helped shape the current culinary scene in Orange County. After cooking briefly at Taco Maria and Bello, he decided it was time to start his own band in the kitchen. He partnered with chef Drew Adams, and the two opened Darkroom in September 2024.
In addition to the frequently changing a la carte menu, Scherer and Adams offer an eight-course, $180 tasting menu with additional wine pairings dubbed Chrysalis. The dinners take place in a small room just off the main dining room, Thursday through Saturday evenings.
The chefs started Chrysalis as a pop-up dinner series at breweries and other locations around town while they were in the process of opening the restaurant. They continued the dinners after Darkroom opened, giving the two a consistent outlet for their unbridled creativity.
The setting is meant to feel like the greenroom or backstage at a show, with tables set into a U-shape.
“What’s up, party people?” Scherer says at the start of a recent Chrysalis dinner. He and Adams address the diners from the middle of the room.
“Nyeeerrrhhoooommmm.”
Scherer sets the first course in front of me while making an airplane noise. I ask if he has a child at home.
“No. I am the child,” he says with a laugh.
If Scherer were the lead singer of a rock band, this would be his side project. It’s meant to be more experimental in spirit than fine dining, and more delicious than stuffy.
Sliced, poached Kusshi oysters are plump but bite-size in a puddle of hollandaise made with macadamia nut milk and kumquats from Scherer’s mother’s garden. He makes a variation of yuzu kosho with the kumquats and black lime powder, then freezes it and shaves it over the top. The lime is curry-esque and the pops of intense, bitter, pithy citrus leave my lips tingling.
Dinner unfolds as a series of sensations rather than a meal, each course more dumbfounding than the next, and I find myself scraping and licking the serving dishes. Rounds of snap peas grilled in koji butter are fresh and crunchy but with a nice char, sitting in a broth made from snap peas, lemongrass and mint. Over the top is a dollop of California river sturgeon caviar lightly smoked to help coax out the sweetness of the peas.
A wedge of Mount Tam cheese with a jagged shard of a sunflower seed cracker serves as the introduction to the dessert courses. Big, juicy stewed Bing cherries spill over the top with a grassy nori oil that helps cut the sweetness and funk from the cheese. It’s unexpected, surprisingly cohesive and, yes, a little weird.
The seeds for some of the most successful dishes on the restaurant’s main a la carte menu are planted during Chrysalis.
A zucchini bread with tartare prepared for a holiday dinner is now one of the most compelling reasons to visit. It’s a riff on Spanish torrijas and what Scherer calls a “bastardization” of jambon au beurre. The zucchini bread is swollen with zucchini and egg, effectively a zucchini custard held together with flour. It’s cut into a thick slab and seared in a cast-iron skillet with koji butter. It’s still sizzling when it hits the table, the edges browned and crisp with a super-luscious pudding-like cake in the middle. Ribbons of Spanish ham are splayed over the top.
It’s a dozen complex texture sensations in a single square. That initial crunch is cushioned by the richness of the butter and the bread itself, like the most decadent piece of French toast. It could be mistaken for dessert, if not for the intense, porky savoriness of the ham. If this ever leaves the menu, I may shed a tear.
The smoked and confited maitake mushrooms that once served as a vegetarian entree during Chrysalis are now a Darkroom menu staple. The mushrooms are smoked with cherry wood, then confited in a mixture of butter, olive oil and Vietnamese-style mushroom bouillon. Mushrooms have never tasted more like themselves, the smoke amplifying the rich, woodsy mushrooms and the grill crisping the fungi’s many petals.
A three-course menu called Apogee, available Thursday evenings, acts as another avenue for R&D and a third way to experience the restaurant. It’s $95 per person and includes wine pairings; supplements are available for purchase.
Recently, the menu included a grilled cruciferous salad of broccoli and wilted greens hidden under a mountain of smoked cheddar curls. The buttermilk crab dressing brought to mind a good Caesar but with sweet crab undertones. It registered as something more substantial than a bowl salad, maybe a steakhouse side dish or the makings of a rich casserole.
The entree for the evening was an Iberico pork loin pounded until it resembled a cutlet, sheathed in panko and fried in a mixture of clarified butter and canola oil. Over the top, tiny squares of pickled kohlrabi. And underneath, a beurre monté spiked with horseradish and salty pops of smoked trout roe with a swirl of chive oil.
There was something about the fleeting nature of the dishes that made me both sad and excited for my next visit. Lucky for me (and you), the pork schnitzel made its way onto the main menu.
Without a full liquor license, there’s a small selection of wine, beer and a cocktail menu by bar director Gianna Marcario. Her mad-scientist beverage style matches the unwieldy nature of the restaurant, with small batches of infused vermouth highlighted in many of the drinks. A lavender-black-pepper-bay-leaf vermouth gives body and a nice briny finish to her interpretation of a dirty martini. The cocktails are numbered, and like the menu, change often.
Chef-driven. Small plates. Farm-to-table. Call it whatever you need to. There is nothing subtle about Scherer’s food, and that’s a very good thing. He’s letting you know exactly who he is with each mouthful, and he’s doing it at an intensity you’d expect from the lead singer of your favorite deathcore band.
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