Inside Chrysalis, one of Orange County’s most personal dining experiences

This is a cathedral.

That, owing to its soaring lightwell, was my initial impression stepping inside Chrysalis, the tasting room tucked inside Santa Ana’s Darkroom. Since opening in 2024, it has already made an airtight case as one of Southern California’s most innovative restaurants with a devoted following and acclaim galore. Rightfully so.

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But Chrysalis, created by chef-owners Zach Scherer and Drew Adams, is not Darkroom’s exclusive back room. Nor is it a VIP annex for the already converted — in fact, this intimate dining experience takes place mere steps away from the main room, and it’s not reserved for insiders or high-rollers.

If Darkroom is the low-lit, vinyl-spinning night out, the main part of the restaurant that hums with music and some of the region’s best food, Chrysalis is its quieter counterpoint, an expansive room located just off the main entrance. White, soaring, almost monastic, with a billowing fabric canopy softening the exposed steel trusses of its lofty nave. Less nightclub, more postmodern chapel – literally not figuratively, given its place inside a circa-1990 building.

Such a distinction matters. Chrysalis gives Scherer and Adams something Darkroom’s à la carte format cannot always allow — namely, a direct line between chef and diner, where food feels less like a series of dishes and more like an album being played through, no skips. No sheet music, no signature-dish grandstanding, no Bourdanian-era machismo. Just two chefs close enough, literally, to the diners, making the entire meal feel deeply personal.

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“We wanted Chrysalis to be something that was a little more exploratory and storytelling,” said Scherer. “Sometimes when you’re sitting in an à la carte restaurant, the story of the food is just what’s on your plate, rather than being conveyed through the people that are making it.”

Chrysalis’ menus used to change in theme every few weeks. I went (gratis, in full disclosure) on a Thursday night during a modern French-themed menu. In total, there were six guests inside that night, along with Scherer and Adams, who helmed the dinner themselves. This, in part, is the draw and difference between Chrysalis and Darkroom. The small number did something key, stripping away the usual tasting-menu fog machine. There was no grand reveal, no server appearing from somewhere behind a wall whispering a farm name spell, no sense that you’ve stumbled into a private club with rules you didn’t quite catch before arrival. Instead, the evening had the feeling of a dinner party hosted by two serious, seasoned cooks who would rather feed you using their own culinary language rather than impress you with another.

The opener, an oyster beneath a coverlet of marigold petals, launched the dinner. The dish, featuring oyster, mignonette granita and Pernod oil, was a marvel, both visually and in the eating. The oyster itself was lightly poached, its usual briny snap softened into something rounder, while the granita, a thrilling savory little slushie, brought the vinegar twang of a classic mignonette without turning into a frozen shallot mess.

Elegant yet not fussy. That matters because Chrysalis, for all its ambitions, is not about making food that scolds you. Scherer isn’t keen on the “fine dining” moniker — at least the contemporary version of it, one that mistakes intimidation or rarified knowledge for taste.

“Some restaurants you go to, you feel like you’re going to a club that you’re not a part of,” he said. “Hospitality at its core is trying to bring people together.”

The oyster dish did exactly that: It took one of the more stereotypically luxury ingredients — the oyster and its slippery iodine charge — and made it not easier, exactly, but more generous. And, coming in second only to taste, pretty. Pretty is good. Everyone should get down with pretty. Scherer said some guests who don’t normally like oysters have responded well to the dish.

The rest of the menu moved with similar confidence, shifting from easy pleasures to more offbeat ones without losing footing. A trout dish came with blackberry vinegar, fig leaf yogurt and sweetbread crispies, the latter adding a chicken-fried crackle to the plate.

A poached scallop followed, paired with vin jaune sauce, tapioca and smoked trout roe. The unfairly maligned scallop found new life here, playing rich against saline and soft against pop. Not for nothing, it too was a stunner, arriving before me looking like something I might find after peeling the paper lid off a multi-hued Jeni’s ice cream flavor. (Consider that high flattery.)

Then came the onion tart, perhaps the dish that best explained how Chrysalis thinks. On paper, it’s an onion tart. On the plate, it’s familiar yet slightly askew, a savory custard with a whipped Comté richness that, together, calls to mind an Alsatian tart. The crowning touch was a hefty dollop of caviar on top, another shoutout to France.

This, too, is where the music metaphor turns useful. Scherer, recently announced as one of several chefs set to open a space at OCVibe’s Katella Commons, talks about menus like a musician talks about composition. He builds them around a few pillar dishes, then fills in the surrounding pieces so the meal makes sense in sequence. Neither he nor Adams, at this point in their careers, talk about extensive R&D with the lab-boat chill that sometimes clings to modernist cooking. He talks about knowing instinctively where a flavor will go before it hits the plate.

For Scherer, that intuition was honed at Playground, the influential, electric DTSA restaurant where he says he helped rewrite the menu, eventually creating roughly 2,000 dishes during his time there. Such output could make a chef sloppy, but not in Scherer’s case, where it seems to have made him more fluent. He talks less about dishes as fixed objects and more about flavor interactions. Acid, fat, bitterness, richness, texture and, above all, harmony.

“I think of things in harmonies,” he said. “I want to make sure there’s musicality to everything we’re doing.”

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At Chrysalis, that score continued with California king salmon, a clever riff on foie gras, with sorrel sauce, brioche and lacto-fermented strawberry. The brioche, which was run through a pasta machine, soaked in butter and baked like bread, added a striking visual. The sorrel brought green sharpness, the fermented berry some twang and the fish held it all together.

A single spear of white asparagus with chicken liver sauce, coffee oil and hazelnut and peanut praline took the evening into more abstract territory. Coffee, used here not as a dessert cue but as a way to deepen bitterness, complemented the liver sauce’s earthiness. This was Chrysalis at its most cerebral, but the dish ate well, which is no small feat.

The most powerful dish of the night might have been the black cod and cuttlefish quenelle (dumpling) with porcini jus, a nuclear-tipped umami powerhouse pulling from French and Japanese techniques. A hay-smoked squab with aubergine and whipped caramelized onion, offering more grounded but still-as-tasty fare.

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With only half a dozen diners for that night (it seats mre), Chrysalis never felt empty. Conversation moved easily, with diners getting to know one another, and talk moving from movies, first concerts and, naturally, food — the kind of banter that happens when a room is small enough for people to hear themselves think. Similar to Darkroom, Scherer and Adams designed the Chrysalis space themselves. They textured and painted the room by hand, which helps explain why it feels less like a formal dining room and more like an open and airy personal extension of themselves.

Darkroom is black, moody, sexy and record-stacked. Chrysalis is white, vertical and almost austere yet still funky. Scherer described the two spaces as different sides of the same personality: the former, the fun and music-loving side where guests can play records at the turntable, the latter the slightly more serious yet still very approachable side where the focus remains on the plate and the chefs.

That approachability is key and refreshing. Like the now-shuttered Trust in Santa Ana, Chrysalis puts the chefs close to the diners and makes the meal feel intimate. But where the check-counter era could, at times, slide into performance, Chrysalis is softer, more touching. Scherer and Adams are present, but they’re not performing at you. Another highlight at Darkroom, and now Chrysalis, is how informative both chefs are servers are, willing to talk about the menu at length.

Dessert began with pain perdu, zucchini, fromage and what the menu called a “honey thing,” a phrasing I won’t improve upon, as both Darkroom and Chrysalis’ descriptions are delightful and spot-on. A glistening, room-temperature wedge of cheese, fitting for a French lineup, provided a welcome hit of richness. Then came chocolate, because, as Scherer put it, “I always end on chocolate.” This iteration arrived with frozen blackberries and mushroom, a final note that was earthy, cold, dark and just unusual enough.

By the end, and after the group conversation slowed its pace, I understood why Scherer resists the idea of a signature dish. Chrysalis doesn’t need one. The meal is not built around a single plate meant to travel on Instagram — but who was I to not give it a try? A dopamine hit from likes is still a dopamine hit — until it becomes a signifying staple. The meal is built sequentially. (I won’t continue to beat the music-album analogy to death, since you’re smart enough to get the gist.)

“We’re kind of the signature dish,” he explained.

Such a statement might sound grand if the room were louder or slicker. But inside Chrysalis, it’s accurate. The point here isn’t one tart, one scallop, or one quenelle, but instead the hands behind them. A special shout-out must go to the deeply talented, how-did-they-do-that bar director Gianna Marcario, who, for those of us who must eschew booze, created a series of mocktails and zero-proof pours.

Both Adams and Scherer are always changing things, making this room-inside-a-room feast worthy of return visits. Chrysalis menus typically run for six weeks, with different themes, but the two are changing things up: Starting July 30, Chrysalis will scale down to a five-course menu of local, umami-boosted courses. The same storytelling remains but with less of a time and price commitment.

Chrysalis is slated to offer two seating times now: one at 6 p.m. and one at 8 p.m., with the cost of dinner running $88, Thursdays through Saturdays. Two pairings will be offered, with the standout bar team also offering a non-alcoholic pairing.

Orange County can be a difficult place for tasting menus. The region doesn’t always reward culinary risk with the same automatic attention as Michelin-star-studded Los Angeles and San Francisco. Scherer knows this. Part of the mission, he said, is to bring those modern food conversations here. But he is also clear that California has to remain at the center of the plate. Yes, Chrysalis looks outward toward France, Scandinavia, Japan and elsewhere, but always remembers where it lives.

And where it lives matters. On Harbor Boulevard, just off the 405 in Santa Ana, one of our region’s best culinary cities, gives the eatery something another Orange County city might not — a slightly off-path charge and a reason to seek it out. Chrysalis isn’t on a gleaming coastal promenade or buried inside a luxury resort. It sits inside Darkroom, itself in a city already teeming with some of the region’s best people and restaurants.

At the end of our conversation, Scherer said something that still sticks with me. “It’s a little addicting as someone who wants people to be happy all the time.”

There are worse addictions for a chef to have. At Chrysalis, that desire shows.

Find it: 3751 S Harbor Blvd., ste C, Santa Ana, instagram.com/enter.chrysalis, 657-777-3275

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