Carrying the torch of sustainable luxury, Atmosphere Kanifushi is home to Just Veg, the Maldives’ original restaurant offering a fully vegetarian fine dining offer – a trend that has now been adopted by other hotels in the country. The resort’s upcoming autumnal festival will celebrate Kanifushi island’s vibrant, plant-forward cuisine while serving as a powerful tool to counter overfishing.
When Just Veg opened in 2014, it was the first purely vegetarian fine-dining restaurant in the Maldives. Offering diners a vast à la carte gourmet veggie menu spanning across Indian, Arabic, Jain and Mediterranean fusion cuisines, it soon became a go-to for many a vegetarian and vegan traveller looking for a resort that would be well equipped to cater to their dietary requirements (which could hardly be more crucial in a destination where you can’t just pop to a local restaurant).
Fast forward ten years and the Maldives’ plant-based panorama has noticeably improved, with fully vegan and/or vegetarian eateries across properties including Patina Maldives, Pullman Maldives Maamutaa and Huvafen Fushi. Just Veg at Atmosphere Kanifushi is, however, very much established as the original trendsetter among the atolls. Its Just Veg Festival, set to be held from the 21st to the 26th of October 2024, seeks to bring plant-based fine dining to the fore by offering a week-long gastronomic adventure with a breathtaking backdrop of sea, sand and sunshine.
By highlighting vegan ingredients and creative dishes, the festival aims to celebrate an existing culture around plant-forward gastronomy in the country. While a fish dinner in the Lhaviyani Atoll may feature lobster, yellow-fin tuna and fish soup, locals traditionally rely heavily on vegetarian and vegan staples. The seven-day programme aims to celebrate just that, featuring a menu crafted by award-winning chef Fabrizio Marino, a regular menu designer at Just Veg. Throughout the week, Marino is set to bring a full-on display of fresh tropical fruits and vegetables to create masterfully crafted dishes for the festival menu. Its show-stopping dinner will include ‘Happiness’, a course designed to echo the flavours of the island, featuring coconut foam, pumpkin puree, fresh apples and tomatoes drizzled in a mint and turmeric sauce. But beyond the chance to discover new flavours, the menu also shows that there’s a real opportunity for vegan and vegetarian dining across the islands’ luxurious hotel scene.
In destinations like the Maldives, a shift towards more plant-based options in hospitality could significantly help to tackle the issue of overfishing, which, according to the UN Environment Programme, has increased from 7% to 33% on a global scale since 1973 (coincidentally, the year after the Maldives opened up to international tourism). And while fishing is integral to Maldivian culture, overfishing is a phenomenon that has been boosted by intense tourism and export practices, with the popularity of yellow-fin tuna across the European and US markets (which affects the entire Indian Ocean) being a prime example. A more global approach to plant-based food is needed to make overfishing a problem of the past, of course, but championing plant-based alternatives in the atolls certainly signals positive progress.
Travellers, too, arguably have a responsibility to search out environmentally sound and sustainable options. For example, local fruits and vegetables should always be at the forefront, because importing produce from faraway places results in excessive and often entirely unnecessary emissions. And regardless of our diets at home, we must be conscious of each destination’s unique challenges. Sometimes, this can simply mean choosing to alternate between fish and plant-based meals if you’re a non-vegan diner.
And as a new generation of travellers increasingly seeks out veggie options, plant-based has a real chance to take its rightful seat at the table when it comes to haute cuisine, where the highest quality ingredients are the freshest one can obtain, and where the nature of protein is second to creativity, celebration and craft. The Just Veg festival at Atmosphere Kanifushi is set to help lead the way to making plant-forward not just an alternative option on the island, but a worthy centrepiece of fine dining. Now that’s something we can get behind.
Photography courtesy of Atmosphere Hotels & Resorts
