Den Haag’s Indonesian Food Culture Is Unlike Anywhere Else in the Netherlands

People are sometimes surprised to learn that Den Haag has one of the most significant Indonesian communities in the Netherlands. It makes more sense when you know the history: after Indonesian independence in 1949, a substantial number of Dutch-Indonesian families settled in the Netherlands, and many of them came to Den Haag. The city has been home to that community for more than seventy years.

The food that came with them is not a cuisine that exists as a restaurant category here. It is woven into the neighbourhood. The Van Boetzelaerlaan and the surrounding streets in the Transvaal and Rustenburg-Oostbroek areas have been a centre of that community for decades, and the restaurants, toko shops, and takeaways that have grown up there reflect generations of actual cooking rather than a menu designed for tourists.

What makes it different

The rijsttafel — the “rice table” spread of multiple small dishes served alongside rice — has roots in Dutch colonial practice, but the version that exists in Den Haag’s Indonesian community bears little resemblance to the tourist-facing versions you find in Amsterdam. It is home cooking scaled up: sambal made fresh, rendang that has been slow-cooked properly, sayur lodeh with the right balance of coconut and spice. The difference between a rijsttafel made by a family that has been cooking this food since their grandparents’ generation and one made to approximate that experience for an outside audience is not subtle.

The toko shops are worth knowing about too. These small Indonesian grocery and deli stores sell prepared foods alongside ingredients — homemade kroket, fried snacks, packaged sambals — and they represent a food culture that operates almost entirely within the community rather than for external consumption. Some of them have been in the same family for thirty or forty years.

Why this matters for understanding Den Haag

Den Haag is a city with a real international dimension that has nothing to do with the international institutions and everything to do with its actual population. The Indonesian community, the Surinamese community, the Turkish and Moroccan communities that arrived through the work migration of the 1960s and 1970s — they all put down roots here and changed the city’s food, its neighbourhoods, its character. The local cuisine of Den Haag is a product of all of that history, and the Van Boetzelaerlaan area is one of the places where you can taste it most directly.

If you are visiting Den Haag and you are going to eat somewhere, go there. Skip the tourist centre. The best meal I have had in this city in the last year was at a table that has been there longer than I have been alive.