Music Up, Lights Down at the Blind Cafe
In Austin, traveling musicians offer patrons unique dining experience.
April 4, 2011— -- It's not every restaurant that requires patrons to work together and rely on waiters to get through a meal.
But at the Blind Cafe, in Austin, Texas, on a recent Saturday evening, patrons filed into a large room much like kindergartners would follow a teacher. Each patron put his or her right hand on the person in front, and the group filed into a pitch-black room behind a blind waiter.
"Gerry, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed here," one nervous patron shouted to the waiter as she entered the room. "I'm O.K. right now, but I just wanted to let you know."
Set up in the cafeteria of St. Martin's Lutheran Church over a three-night period, the Blind Cafe featured sounds of a live saxophonist and the smell of curry as more than 92 patrons entered the darkened room on the last night.
With every kind of light covered over or turned off, patrons could not rely on their eyes to tell them anything about the room, the food or even their tablemates. Instead, throughout the evening, their blind wait staff attended to their needs and at the end of the dinner, the diners were given the opportunity to ask questions about blindness. Questions ranged from simple ones such as how the blind wait staff dressed themselves to more in-depth ones asking about each blind server's personal stories.
It's all part of experiencing the Blind Cafe -- a traveling live music cafe created by Brian Rocheleau, who prefers to be called Rosh, the 33-year-old lead singer and guitarist of the folk rock group One Eye Glass Broken.
"I'm not blind, and in no way are we trying to simulate blindness for people," Rosh told ABCNews.com. "There are very different types of blindness. Some people lose it over their entire lives, and others are blind at birth. So to try to claim that we would create an experience of blindness for people would be wrong."
Rosh said that as a musician, his initial goal was to create a concert in darkness where people wouldn't be distracted by cellphones and social media or even social etiquette. However, he decided to reach out to the blind community after realizing the cafe could be a philanthropy project and could be used to raise donations for local charities.
For Austin's Blind Cafe, Rosh was able to donate one hundred percent of the proceeds -- almost $1,500 -- made on one night to the 2011 Bell Program, a program for Braille Enrichment for Literacy and Learning in Austin.
Related Stories
ABC News Live