Darkroom

For roughly five years, the Santa Ana space currently housing Darkroom was a restaurant called Beyond the Baguette, which served decidedly okay Vietnamese food alongside a French-style bakery. Although we’d been intrigued by the menu, and found the atypically large, sky-lit space to be compelling, one visit was enough for us. Making its name literal, Darkroom has transformed the space by opening only at night, using the skylight to provide minimal ambient lighting, and giving tables their own small LED lamps, focusing each guest’s attention on what’s immediately in front of them, and making the dining experience feel intimate.

The menu is pretty straightforward: 18 dishes, including three desserts, with perhaps half rotating every 1.5 weeks. By the time you read this, virtually everything we tried should be gone, so if there’s something that catches your eye – as a Spanish-style torrijas dessert did before we arrived – prepare to hear, as we did, that it had been swapped off the menu one day ago. In other words, you’re coming here to trust the chef to make whatever’s good while using a mix of currently available Californian and international ingredients.

Note that the back of the menu and supplementary pages are devoted to drinks. Darkroom pitches itself as a “restaurant and wine bar,” and offers a mix of number-coded cocktails, a couple handfuls of beers, and plenty of wine choices. To the extent that you’re coming here primarily or substantially to imbibe – either for a date night or hanging out with friends – your experience may vary from ours, which was largely focused on the culinary side of the equation. (We went with two mocktails, one shiso and one hibiscus, and loved both.)