The tiny, hidden Valley restaurant where the chef is legally blind

“My whole life, up to this point, has been an act.”

Is Andrew McCrea being dramatic? Not particularly, it turns out.

McCrea has only 6 per cent vision. Legally, he’s blind. But if you’ve ever met him at one of the numerous hotels and restaurants where he’s worked around Brisbane – Mews at Crystalbrook Vincent, Thomson’s Reserve at The New Inchcolm (which was awarded a chef’s hat during his tenure), Strangers’ Restaurant at Queensland Parliament – you might not have had a chance to notice.

“I would just memorise everything,” McCrea says. “I remember standing in front of something like 100 chefs at one hotel in an enormous ballroom. What someone like you can see at 60 metres, I can see at three metres.

“I stood there with a [profit and loss] sheet and I couldn’t really read it, but I could recite the figures. I would hold the paper where I thought it was acceptable, and no one would think any different. I got sick of doing that.”

McCrea was born with blue cone monochromacy, an inherited eye disease caused by the absence of functional red and green cone photoreceptor cells. So, by the time he eschewed a law career to begin his training as a chef in 1998, he was already skilled in the art of compensation.

“My whole life, up to this point, has been an act.”

Andrew McCrea

“When I wound up as a section chef, I could memorise all the dockets,” he says. “I’d know the third docket was Table 14 and that they had this many of each particular dish. No one ever knew there was anything different about me.”

Now, McCrea has dropped the act.

In August last year, he opened Perspective Dining, a 12-seat restaurant that hides in plain sight on Chinatown Mall in Fortitude Valley.

Perspective was an opportunity to finally have his own business. But it was also an opportunity to be upfront with diners about his disability – and lean into it.

“I thought, ‘I’m just going to build something and to be completely honest with myself, and I’m going to see what happens.’ It was like coming out of a closet.”

Perspective is very much in the style of a Joy or a Katsu Ya – small omakase- or degustation-style restaurants where a chef-patron hosts a limited number of seats to help control overheads. On a typical night, McCrea works alongside just one other chef in a kitchen designed specifically for his needs (there’s also a sommelier on the restaurant floor).

There’s no gas, storage is mostly in drawers, and just about everything can be moved. In the dining room, each table’s cutlery sits in a special cradle, so McCrea doesn’t knock it when he lands food.

Otherwise, the fit-out has a kind of understated rusticism, with textured tables, tanned leather seating, arched windows and sheer curtains. The ceilings are high, meaning the space is intimate without feeling poky.

“Everything has a certain place,” McCrea says. “Even the floor – the floor’s really white so I can see if anything hits the floor.”

McCrea’s lack of eyesight also influences his food. He doesn’t focus as much on the look of a dish as other chefs, he says, and is driven more by texture.

“Sometimes when you go to restaurants, the first bite is the best bite. And you’re like, ‘Man, I want to go back to that first bite,’” he says. “It’s like when you take acid for the first time, you want to go back to the very first experience, right? For me, the last bite should be as epic as the first.”

The menu evolves with the seasons (and has changed since this masthead visited) but you might eat dishes such as smoked Moreton Bay bug with ham hock terrine, sour almond, raw peas and red onion pickle; gramma pumpkin with burnt pumpkin skin, local honey and flowers; or a “mushroom garden” that pulls together different varieties of mushroom from Zillmere’s Good Growin’ Gourmet Mushrooms, finishing it with a sheep’s milk skin and celeriac truffle.

There’s stacks of flavour and technique across a typical dinner’s nine courses. And McCrea has an artful bent (despite his inability to perceive much colour), carefully arranging his dishes on natty ceramic crockery produced by Shut Up & Relax and Kim Wallace.

Still, it’s the texture that tends to stick with you, whether it’s the succulence of the bug matched to a typically dense terrine and the firm nuttiness of the peas, or the mushroom dish with its six different varieties of fungi and a “compost” made from black garlic, nuts and grains.

Throughout the night, McCrea encourages guests to move freely about the space and interact with him at the kitchen bench. It means Perspective ultimately feels more like dining at a mate’s house than somewhere you’ll be handed a bill at the end of the night.

“At first, having my own place was intimidating,” McCrea says. “Now, it’s liberating. When people come here, whether it’s two people or 12 people, they leave changed. You can feed hundreds of people, or thousands of people, but it doesn’t necessarily change them.

“At other places, you put forward dishes, and your best foot forward for those establishments, but this is 110 per cent me.”

Open Tue-Sat 11.30am-3pm; 6.30pm-late.

Shop 6/315 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, 0415 756 058.

perspectivedining.com.au