The kitchen was already hot when we began wondering whether this was actually going to work.
There were knives on the counters, pans on the stoves and oil heating in front of us. Ingredients were being arranged at the cooking stations, while around the room people were getting ready for the competition to begin.
The contestants who were about to enter the kitchen were blind or visually impaired.
Suddenly, all the questions that had seemed manageable while we were planning the event became very real.
How would they handle the knives? How would they work around the gas? What would happen when the oil became hot? How would they know when something was properly cooked?
We had asked ourselves some of these questions before. We had also heard them from other people.
But now there was no more planning left to do.
The contestants were about to start cooking.
We simply did not know what would happen.
The idea itself had begun much earlier, with something far more ordinary than a cooking competition.
We had come across the story of a blind woman who wanted to learn cooking because she loved making different dishes for her family and friends. The first time she brought up the idea at home, her father refused. Fear had taken over. There were too many questions about whether she would be able to manage the kitchen, and she eventually had to leave the idea aside.
But she did not give up.
After some time, she raised the subject again. Her father asked her questions about her ability to do something he considered difficult for someone who could not see. She had to answer those questions and convince him that she could learn. Her own confidence was not yet complete, but her desire to learn was stronger than her uncertainty. Eventually, the family decided to appoint a professional teacher.
Then came the first day of her cooking class.
She started learning the techniques and became so absorbed in the process that she did not realise how quickly the time had passed. What had looked like an impossible task to others was becoming a skill she could actually learn. In time, she became confident enough to handle cooking successfully on her own.
Her story made us think about something beyond cooking.
The problem was not really whether blind people could cook. The problem was that many people had never seen them do it, and therefore assumed they could not.
We had already spent years working to change perceptions around education and employment. We knew that sometimes the biggest barrier was not a person’s ability but the expectations of the people around them.
Cooking presented the same problem in a very ordinary form.
If a blind girl was never allowed into the kitchen because her family believed she could not manage it, she would never get the chance to discover what she could do.
So we began to wonder whether talking about the issue was enough.
What if people could actually watch blind and visually impaired people cook?
What if they did it in a real competition, under pressure, with professional chefs judging their food?
That was when the idea of Golden Eye Chef began to take shape.
The original proposal was not simply about finding the best cook. We wanted visually impaired people to display their culinary skills and compete for the Golden Eye Chef award. The larger purpose was to challenge the belief that visually impaired people, particularly visually impaired women, were incapable of taking care of themselves and their families.
It sounded straightforward when we wrote it down.
In reality, we were entering territory we knew very little about.
We had never organised a cooking competition. We did not know how many participants would come forward, how they would manage a professional kitchen, what adaptations would be needed or how professional chefs would respond to them.
We did not know what the kitchen would look like once the competition actually began.
That uncertainty stayed with us as we prepared for the first edition.
Eventually, thirty-two visually impaired contestants took part—sixteen fully blind and sixteen partially blind. They competed through different stages before six contestants reached the grand finale. Professional chefs and experts were involved in judging their culinary skills.
And then the questions became visible.
A judge later described what he had been thinking before seeing the contestants work. He had wondered how blind chefs would handle hot oil, gas, cooking equipment and utensils. He had assumed there would be serious difficulties.
Then he watched them.
His assumptions failed.
He wrote that the contestants were focused, knew what they were doing and that there was nothing wrong with their cooking. He was surprised by their confidence and their understanding of food and spices.
That was the moment the purpose of the competition became clearer to us.
We had thought we were creating a contest to prove that blind people could cook.
The contestants did not seem to need that proof.
They already knew they could cook.
What they needed was an opportunity to stand in front of people who did not know that and let them see it for themselves.
One of the contestants, Forum Lodaya, explained to the judges how she would prepare her pasta. When asked how she would cut it, she simply said she would use a knife. The conversation moved naturally into the ingredients and the technique.
That was what we wanted the competition to become.
Not a demonstration of what blind people could somehow overcome, but a cooking competition in which the cooking itself became the focus.
The knives were there.
The hot oil was there.
The gas was there.
The contestants were there.
And they cooked.
Looking back, the title of this story describes our starting point more honestly than anything else could.
We didn’t know.
We didn’t know how blind chefs would handle a competitive kitchen. We didn’t know what the judges would see. We didn’t know how the audience would react. We didn’t know that an idea which began with a question about cooking would eventually grow into something much larger.
But perhaps not knowing was useful.
If we had known exactly what Golden Eye Chef would become, perhaps we would have planned it differently. Instead, we entered it with questions, learned from the people who participated, made mistakes, adjusted, and kept going.
The first lesson was simple.
Sometimes you don’t need to know whether something is possible before giving someone the opportunity to try.
Sometimes you only find out what is possible after you open the door.