Dream Simmers For Deaf, Blind Chef -- Renton Man's Recipe For Success Is Cajun Restaurant

RENTON - For Danny Delcambre, the world is silent and fuzzy around the edges - but full of flavors.

The Cajun-born man's flavors of choice run to the savory spices of his native Louisiana. The simmered strains of French, Caribbean, Spanish, African and American foods make up the cuisine that runs in his blood like a birthright, learned first at his mother's side.

Those are the flavors Delcambre dreams of unleashing as a chef in his own Seattle-area restaurant. Now a Renton resident, he went back to New Orleans this winter, back to the Mecca of Cajun cooking, for a 10-week internship in the kitchen of K-Paul's, one of the city's most famous restaurants.

But there's another birthright running in Delcambre's blood, one that makes his restaurant odyssey all the more remarkable. Delcambre was born with Usher's syndrome, a hereditary disorder that caused him to be deaf and legally blind.

The disorder is disproportionately common in parts of Louisiana, said Elizabeth Hadden, a doctoral candidate at Tulane University Medical School. She said the region's historical isolation and low population created a gene pool susceptible to hereditary disorders.

Delcambre, 32, has severe tunnel vision and night blindness; he has trouble seeing contrasts, and stairs are a challenge. He can read and write large type, but he communicates mostly through American Sign Language. He does not speak.

Delcambre worked in a Louisiana food warehouse until the oil bust there in the early '80s took his job away. He moved to the Seattle area in 1987 because of its supportive deaf blind community and worked for two years in a machine shop for blind workers. But when it became clear he would have trouble getting a full-time job in a machine shop as a deaf blind worker, Delcambre shifted his goals.

"I started to focus in more on what I really wanted to do for a career," explained Delcambre, in writing. He was taking classes at South Seattle Community College and eating regularly in the dining hall, where food was supplied by students in the culinary-arts program. "That got me thinking about how much I like cooking Cajun, and why not become a chef?"

Why not, indeed?

Delcambre has since taken four quarters of cooking classes at Seattle Central Community College, which provides interpreters. He's now finishing up his studies there with an independent project to set up a business plan for his restaurant. He has hired a restaurant consultant, is lining up loans and is looking for a good location. He hopes soon to open "Delcambre's Ragin' Cajun," which he estimates will cost between $30,000 and $50,000.

At the start, Delcambre envisions a small restaurant, about 10 tables, serving lunches only. Kitchen workers would have to be able to sign fluently, he said.

"The menu would have to be limited - I can't have an extensive menu like they do at K-Paul's. That would be way too much work," said Delcambre through an interpreter.

Usher's syndrome presents Delcambre with unusual challenges in a kitchen, but it doesn't keep him from doing anything, he said.

At K-Paul's, for example, he worked on almost every stage of food preparation, cutting vegetables, making sandwiches, deep-frying seafood, making sauces and salad dressings and baking breads.

Because of his deafness, he carries a special timing device that vibrates to signal when something is done cooking. Because of his limited sight, he has to be careful to puts ingredients where he can easily find them.

"That is one thing that is a problem in a big kitchen, because nobody puts things away. That wastes a lot of my time," Delcambre said.

But for a chef, sight and sound are secondary senses. Taste and smell rule in a kitchen, and there Delcambre is at no disadvantage.

"It seems to me that people with good vision don't use their sense of smell as much as blind people do," Delcambre said. He suggested an experiment for those with full vision. Put a blindfold on the next time you make coffee, Delcambre said, and see how it comes alive.

At K-Paul's, Delcambre said he learned a few restaurant tricks and refined his all-important sense of taste. "I learned that it's important to always taste in every step of a procedure," Delcambre said.

"You can't just rely on a recipe and expect the food to taste the same, which is what a restaurant needs. Ingredients change, so you can't rely on the flavors to stay the same. A good chef has to be able to adjust flavors while cooking."

Delcambre said support for his venture has been strong among his friends and in the deaf blind community. His wife, Holly, said opening a restaurant will be a good match of his interests and abilities.

"What was important for me was that Danny do what he wanted to, and not that he listen to what other people told him," she said.