A Blind Husband and Sighted Wife at a ‘Dine in the Dark’ Restaurant

Our experience at Montreal's Onoir

For the podcast version of this post, click here.

Sometime in the 90’s, a Swiss pastor named Jorge Spielmann started inviting people over to his house to dine blindfolded. Jorge was blind, and he wanted to give sighted people the chance to exercise empathy for blind people.

This is a terrible idea. Putting on a blindfold is not anything like being blind. It is like going blind. It simulates the very first moments of blindness. That is not my experience. I do not wake up every morning and go, “OH NO! I’VE LOST MY VISION!!!” and tell my wife she must immediately take me to the emergency room. No, my mornings are mostly the same as yours (unless you’re a morning person, in which case you’re a monster and we are not the same). But you are not able to experience how similar our mornings are. You can’t put a blindfold on when you wake up and have a routine, uninteresting, blind morning. That takes practice. Within about a minute, you will be tripping head over heels into your bathtub yelling “I give up!”

Anyway, later, Pastor Jorge leveled up his little project. He opened a restaurant to turn what he was doing at home into a business and employ blind waiters. Now this move I respect. We constantly deal with sighted people’s ignorance about how our lives work. Might as well make some “novel experience” money off it. Several places across the globe later copied the idea, some with blindfolded customers, some with pitch-black dining rooms. None are near me.

There is, however, one in that little corner of the Great White North that insists English is for peons. That’s right, I’m talking about Quebec, a place I, a peon, visit frequently because it’s where my wife’s family lives. The restaurant is in Montreal, and it’s called Onoir, a purposeful misspelling of the French phrase meaning “in the dark.” It’s the pitch-black-dining-room variety.

My wife, Gabrielle, and I first went about ten years ago, but I didn’t remember much from that trip (certainly not enough to write about it). Though I did remember one detail from when Gabrielle’s mom and brother went a few weeks after us. It was her brother recounting with indignance that he discovered his mom quietly stealing his food in the dark because she liked it better than hers.

One evening this summer, Gabrielle and I returned.