Even before Christine Ha became a food-world sensation by winning Season 3 of Fox’s intense “MasterChef” cooking competition, the Houston native nurtured the dream of running her own restaurant serving highly personal interpretations of classic Vietnamese dishes.

One would assume that the notoriety of clinching one of reality television’s biggest competitions with a purse of $250,000 would have assured her a quick step into a shiny new H-Town restaurant. But it took years — seven, to be exact — for Ha to realize her goal.

There were roadblocks both small and consequential. Her time suddenly was taken by the fame machine of being a “MasterChef” star: writing a best-selling cookbook and flying to countless speaking gigs. There was the matter of finding the right real estate in the hot — and expensive — Houston restaurant market. There was the fact that neither she nor her husband and business partner, John Suh, had any practical experience in operating a restaurant and managing a culinary staff; neither had ever worked in a restaurant. Also, Ha is blind.

Consider a blind chef running a restaurant kitchen. With sharp knives, flame-licked woks and bubbling deep fryers. With a cooking line, where orders are barked and nimble, split-second dexterity is the norm, that is most certainly not a place for people who walk with a white cane.

But last week Ha opened The Blind Goat in the new Bravery Chef Hall downtown that features five chef-driven restaurants and three bars under one roof. Ha’s fans will see her supervising the daily operations and tasting the food from recipes she painstakingly developed. While she is not actually cooking, she is the unifying presence of The Blind Goat. And while she clearly is identified by her sightless condition — her website is called The Blind Cook, which is also her Instagram handle — she is not defined by her blindness.

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Ha is the first to tell you there was a time in college when she tried to hide that she was losing her sight: “I used to be ashamed I had vision loss,” she said. “I would try not to use my cane and I’d end up walking into walls.”

Today, at 40, Ha has found international fame, not just in the culinary realm. She is an advocate for the blind and the 2014 recipient of the Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind.

She is cook. She is blind. And that she is both makes her a rarity in the restaurant world. While the thought of a blind chef working in a restaurant kitchen is enough to give anyone pause, those fires and sharp edges weren’t the hardest part about opening The Blind Goat. She had to teach her staff about how to work with a visually impaired person.

“Not to be afraid to take my hand and show me, and talk about what’s going on where,” Ha said. “They’ve learned I don’t take my blindness seriously, and it’s not something to tiptoe around.”

Opportunity knocks

Like the other contestants in Season 3 of “MasterChef,” Ha entered the competition for amateur cooks an unknown. By the time the show entered its nail-biting finale, she was a fan favorite, not just for the Asian-flavored food she prepared but for her calm and methodical approach to cooking where she relied on her other senses. She won the competition in September 2012, besting 17 contestants from among the 30,000 home cooks who applied to be on the show.

That she was blind made her a curiosity on the show where she negotiated the many cooking challenges using tools such as a talking thermometer, Braille bumps on the stove and oversize oven mitts to keep her from getting burned. She performed all her own knife skills and plating. The show’s judges, including the notoriously hard to please superchef Gordon Ramsay, were blown away.

After winning, Ha immediately began working on her first cookbook, “Recipes from My Home Kitchen,” published in 2013, with a praising foreward from Ramsay. When Ha’s cookbook hit the New York Times bestseller list, she recalls it ranked just above Gwyneth Paltrow’s “It’s All Good” cookbook. “I got to brag about that,” Ha said with a laugh.

She remained busy, co-hosting a Canadian cooking show “Four Senses” and judging the Vietnamese version of “MasterChef.” There were interviews for NPR, BBC and CNN; TEDx talks and culinary travel opportunities that took her to Jordan, Serbia and Croatia. And celebrity chef appearances throughout the United States, as well as guest spots on newer seasons of “MasterChef.”

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The one thing that didn’t come as quickly as fame was the restaurant. For a variety of reasons, the type of restaurant Ha wanted to create — an intimate Vietnamese gastropub — was hard to pin down. “No other opportunities felt right. I didn’t want a 200-seat restaurant,” she said. “It didn’t feel right in my gut.”

Suh, a web developer who also calls himself a “startup junkie” because he likes to invest in new ventures, said he and Ha were waiting for the right time and place. Crunching the numbers, too, was daunting, he said: “It was crazy. It was easily a half million to million dollar” investment to open a new restaurant.

But one day in 2017 Suh saw on NextSeed that Bravery was looking for investors. That got him thinking about food halls, a dining concept that was sweeping the country. Eventually there were talks with Bravery partners Anh Mai, Lian Nguyen and Shepard Ross.

Both parties saw an opportunity. By March 2018 Bravery announced that Ha was joining the project with her first restaurant, The Blind Goat, a 20-seater specializing in Nhau cuisine, known as Vietnamese drinking food. It was a coup for Bravery, which at the time was struggling with delays in opening. Ha, with her international fan base, was Bravery’s biggest get.

“We were ecstatic,” Mai said. “She is inspiring to all of us. She has a huge following and it’s amazing to be part of that.”

Experiencing loss

For being a culinary bigshot, Ha’s upbringing didn’t suggest a career in cooking. The only child of an electrical designer father and a social worker mother, Ha was born in California but raised in Alief since she was 2. Her mother was an accomplished home cook who was so good, Ha’s father often encouraged his wife to open her own Vietnamese noodle shop. That opportunity never came.

When Ha was 14, she lost her mother to lung cancer. And with her mother’s passing went the foods Ha grew up with. Her mother never allowed her to cook; she left no recipes for Ha to follow.

After graduating from Elsik High School in Alief, she attended the University of Texas at Austin where she received a business administration degree, followed by a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Houston. At 19 she began to lose her vision to an autoimmune disease called Neuromyelitis optica, which attacks the spinal cord and eye nerves. Her eyesight will never improve, Suh said. Ha describes her sight as looking in a fog-coated mirror: “I can see shadows and contrast colors, blobs and blurriness.”

When she was on “MasterChef” there were people who doubted she actually was blind. The show’s producers asked Ha to explain her blindness to the media. She told Entertainment Weekly this: “It’s a very common misconception that people think blindness is all or nothing. It’s not true at all,” she said. “The way I often describe it is that it’s like if you take a really hot shower and then you look into the foggy bathroom mirror, where you only see vague shapes and shadows.”

Ha says she still encounters disbelievers: “When people say, ‘You don’t look blind’ or ‘You look normal,’ it’s offensive.”

She coped with her vision loss the only way she knew how, she said. She pressed on.

“It was a setback. I grieved it. It was a loss,” she said. “But then you deal with the hand you’re dealt. You move on. I am a very determined person.”

‘Dream come true’

Yes, there is goat on The Blind Goat menu: a luxurious stew of fall-apart chunks of goat shoulder bathed in a coconut-rich sauce steeped in lemongrass, served over rice and topped with a garnish of pickled mustard greens like Ha’s mother used to make. Ha also pays tribute to her mother with an appetizer of fried eggrolls filled with pork and shrimp; on the menu they’re called “Ma’s Eggrolls” and Ha said she had to rely on her memory to get the flavors and textures right.

There are other dishes such as puffed rice noodles with tofu and wok-fried greens; tofu and rice vermicelli bowl with tamarind, toasted coconut, pickled vegetables and a soy sauce egg (a nod to Suh’s Korean culinary heritage); beef short ribs flavored with lemongrass and five-spice powder served over rice; and for dessert, Ha’s “Rubbish Apple Pie,” the one Ramsay praised on “MasterChef,” but flavored with star anise and ginger and served with a fish sauce caramel. More of Vietnamese street- and Nhau-style creations are coming, as well as other traditional Vietnamese dishes as Ha continues to unlock her mother’s recipes from memory.

“Her palate is unbelievable,” said Ha’s head chef, Jimmy Kieu. “It’s awesome.”

Cesar Cano, the Houston high school teacher who last year made it into the finals of Season 9 of “MasterChef,” calls Ha a role model for aspiring home cooks who dream of becoming a chef. “She represents that whole idea of going through obstacles to make something happen,” he said. “People saw in her something that withstands the test of time. She had that charisma that resonated with people.”

Cano also called Ha an outlier because unlike many of “MasterChef” winners, Ha actually realized her goal of owning a restaurant. “For her to finally get there? I have mad respect for Christine,” he said.

Bravery Chef Hall’s partners have always intended the project to be an incubator for the chefs to gain practical experience to launch new projects, either brand extensions or entirely new brick and mortar concepts. Ha and Suh already have options (“John is always thinking five steps ahead,” Ha said of her husband). Mai said an investor has approached Ha and Suh to pledge financing for another restaurant. Even in the first week of Bravery’s opening, its goal of making culinary stars is already happening.

Suh said he hopes one of his new ventures will be a high-end Korean barbecue restaurant in Houston. He also jokes he’d like to one day open a restaurant called The Sighted Pig. (In Asian cultures, Ha was born under the sign of the goat — considered creative and sensitive creatures who often are surrounded by “an admiring pig,” Ha said. Suh was born under the sign of the pig.)

Ha has waited a long time for The Blind Goat. In those seven years she’s said she’s learned a lot about dealing with foodie fame, but not enough about the restaurant world. “I consider myself a pretty good home cook but not necessarily a restaurant chef,” she said. “I still have a lot to learn.”

She’s called the months leading up to the restaurant opening so exhausting that she hasn’t had the chance to truly ponder that “this is my dream come true.”

For now, it’s enough that a hot new restaurant is on the Houston dining scene, courtesy of a blind goat and her admiring pig.

greg.morago@chron.com

instagram.com/gregmorago

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