The below vegan grading system is based on the vegan gastronomical experiences of our staff at dive resorts, dive liveaboards, or wholly vegan dive resorts/liveaboards represented on our site; information relating to the individual menus and offerings is on hand, just ask us.
When scoring plant-based dishes, we considered taste, presentation, creativity, effort, and the use of locally produced products (if possible). We call our grading system the ‘Al Thursby’ after our colleague Alistair Thursby. Al has been a crusader for the environment for aeons and has brought thousands of PADI babies into being. Al has run vegan dive resorts and liveaboards all over Asia, most recently instilling vegan diving love in the crew and passengers on the Palau Siren, Palau.
Five of Al’s leaves are reserved for the creme de la creme, not cream but a vegan alternative, a rumbling that wells in the stomach, up the throat, flies past the taste buds, and roars out Holy Shit!
This accolade is for those dive resorts and liveaboards who have not only made a great effort to support a plant-based diet but have risen up and are actively spreading vegan love. The dishes on offer show great creativity, presentation, and thoughtfulness, amplify the use of local produce, and of course taste bloody great. As someone who enjoys eating plant-based, this is what you would wish for on every diving holiday.
Four of Al’s leaves represent an incredible meal that may dangerously leave you skipping dives just to eat more at lunch. This award is given to those dive resorts and liveaboards that have made a fantastic effort to support plant-based diets. They have actively thought about and created great saliva-inducing vegan dishes that you would recommend to others, whether you are Vegan or not. These menus will keep you coming back, not just for diving but also for eating. These operations have gone ‘beyond’ and see it’s not ‘impossible’.
Three of Al’s leaves are for those that have at least given it a crack. The ball hasn’t left the park but dribbled away to the onside for two. Plant-based offerings that leave you full and contented, comfortable like a vegan mac n cheese or a burger that has not yet gone impossible or beyond, but has a sensible vegan patty nevertheless. You will certainly be back for the consistent cuisine and the awesome diving.
Two of Al’s leaves are for those menus that think plant-based dining is salad and for other such things that a ‘rabbit’ may consume. Eating here is something that you can put up with because the diving is so damn good, but remain unsatisfactorily full of empty carbs and fancy lettuce. You won’t find dive resorts and liveaboard operators with two leaves here, but we are more than willing to help those with a two-leaf rating to step up their vegan game, please get in touch.
The one Al leaf rating has been a bit of an impossible sausage of contention here at Infinite Blue. Al, in his Vegan benevolence, has suggested that all plant-based menu items should be given a chew, but we also recommend that you dig around looking for hidden meat bits, shrimp, or fish that have been placed there because you obviously don’t know what you are missing out on.
These dive operators not only show a complete lack of empathy, appalling customer service, and inability to evolve but will indeed not be featured here. Although in these cases, there is a very slim chance of success, Al has again offered to help with suggestions to improve your kitchen and step your company up into a new compassionate world.
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