Agga Food Guide

Well, I’m going to do my best. As a born-and-bred Hagenees and a foodie pur sang, of course I have to make a food guide about my Agga, so we’re going to get started on it.

I was born and raised here, and I’ll die here too, I always say. I love my city and live with great pleasure in the Zeeheldenkwartier (the Piet Heinstraat). Many places from this guide are in and around the Piet Heinstraat — not because I’m lazy, but because the culinary center is simply located here.

Breakfast

We start with breakfast, and I will name one place the place to have breakfast: Hotel Des Indes. An iconic and beautiful hotel. You feel like you’re almost in a museum and the atmosphere exudes chic. The breakfast costs €35 p.p., but it’s really great value for money. You can have unlimited tea, coffee, and orange juice. Fresh eggs are cooked for you — fried egg, omelet, scrambled, or poached — exactly how you want it. Egg yolk dripping when you take a bite, completely dry, or something in between: anything is possible.

You can have unlimited bacon, and hotel bacon is top-notch almost everywhere, but certainly here. There is a buffet with salmon, cheese, salami, ham, croissants, four types of sliced bread, hard and soft rolls, and a toaster. You can eat until you explode, and after that, you can also order freshly made French toast, pancakes, or poffertjes. Tip if you have a twin brother: wear the same clothes and take turns every now and then — then it’s really a bargain.

Coffee

The Hague is also a real coffee city. There are hundreds of coffee shops with great coffee, and my street, the Piet Heinstraat, already has about twelve that are really good. But the best is and remains Bagels & Beans at the Piet Heinplein. Chris, the manager, ensures a pleasant atmosphere, has a nice chat with you, and the coffee is delicious: not too strong, but certainly not weak. The cappuccino has great foam that your little spoon stays upright in. And the price is surprisingly low.

If you happen to be a bit short on cash, no problem. Walk a bit further and drink for €1.85 a slightly smaller cappuccino at the Coffee Corner of the Albert Heijn. Yes, you’re hearing it right: a foodie guide promoting the Appie. The coffee there — and certainly the cappuccino — is fine. And to complete your breakfast, you buy for €1.20 four fresh petit croissants that are perfectly acceptable.

Cheese & delicatessen

If you want toppings for that? No problem. Next to the Appie is a good cheese merchant, namely De Ruiter Kaasmarkt, which has an enormous extensive selection and also an absurd amount of types of salami and ham.

Next: Ed Boele on the Fahrenheitstraat. Multiple-time winner of ‘best cheese merchant’. A somewhat quieter shop than De Ruiter Kaasmarkt: where De Ruiter mainly excels in its enormous selection (sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees), Ed Boele is less extensive, but the cheeses are neatly sorted and they don’t have cold cuts. Like De Ruiter, Ed Boele has a beautiful selection of Dutch cheeses, but also many French, Italian, and other foreign cheeses that are displayed in a nice order.

Traiteurs & specialty shops

Another shop you should visit is Gransjean at the Bankaplein: a great traiteur with delicious salmon and a beautiful selection of cheeses and cold cuts, but also wine and evening meals. And of course, you can also go there for a tasty sandwich. The best cold cuts, however, can be found in Rijswijk at “De lachende koe” also a traiteur with both cheese, cold cuts, and meals. Their sandwiches are incredibly tasty. The ribeye sandwich 2.0 with truffle and Parmesan cheese and a delicious sauce is fantastic, definitely worth the trip to Rijswijk.

Italian

Back to the Piet Heinstraat. Since I was a child, I’ve been going to Italy (formerly Cristofoli), an Italian specialty shop of top quality. You need to go there for the best mortadella, the best lasagna, and delicious freshly made arancini. And that’s just a small selection from their assortment: it’s an abundance of Italian delicacies, carefully selected.

A few doors down is the relatively new Arte Bianca, a fairly large Italian restaurant run by two guys from Sardinia. It’s a real Italian, although the interior looks a bit sterile. Try there the pasta alle vongole with bottarga — a Sardinian specialty — or one of their sandwiches with a thick, thick layer of toppings. They also have a wide assortment of pizzas; there’s really something for everyone.

Diagonally across the street is Capo Cucina, a unique restaurant/cooking studio. Owner Romano is, like me, half Sicilian. During the week he does private cooking and on weekends he is open as a restaurant. He serves delicious Sicilian dishes of top quality for a reasonable price.

To stay in the mood of Italian restaurants, we now walk down the Mauritskade to the renowned NONA. Again a half-Sicilian lady who makes really fucking tasty Sicilian dishes, in a slightly trendy jacket but yet classic. A downside: it’s almost impossible to make a reservation. You really have to put in a lot of effort

for that. But it is absolutely worth it. The cheerful Julia provides, while chatting, an entire evening full of delicacies.

Sushi & Asian

Then sushi. Of course, sushi is widely available, but also a lot of crap-all-you-can-eat-shit. We stay far away from that. Two establishments stand out:

Kiraku on the Toussaintkade. It’s expensive, but really top quality. Try the crispy chicken sushi or simply the tuna nigiri (boring but terribly tasty). Try the king crab salad, the tuna-wasabi salad, or the shrimp tempura. And if you don’t like fish: they have excellent beef teriyaki. There is something for everyone to enjoy.

De Sushi Meisjes, mainly takeaway or delivery, but you can also eat on the spot. They have good quality sushi, slightly cheaper than Kiraku, and no warm meat dishes. A minor downside is that they don’t have nigiri, and that is my favorite. But their completely own style of sushi is refreshing; it’s really very different from any other sushi place.

The absolute top when it comes to sushi, however, is Morikawa on the Balistraat, near my neighborhood. If you go left at the end of the Laan van Meerdervoort, you enter the Archipelbuurt where this real Japanese sushi place is located. Run by a Japanese couple in a kind of canteen, you are helped by them in broken English. It’s not a beautiful place, it’s also not a night out, and it’s EXPENSIVE. This is for the real foodies, the lovers of good food. An omakase menu costs 90 euros. A salmon nigiri €5.40 and a tuna nigiri €8.40. Butttttt it is absolutely worth it. The scallops are buttery soft, the salmon is super flavorful, and the rice is in Osaka style, in contrast to Kiraku where they have Tokyo style sushi.

We stay in the neighborhood for a bit and go to Zheng on the Prinsestraat, a high-end Chinese nouvelle-cuisine restaurant that, in my eyes, is great. You can have a tasting menu there of 5, 6, 7, or 8 ‘chapters’ that are almost worthy of De Librije. Every time again it’s an adventure to have the 8-course menu there. It’s not cheap, but it is value for money.

Around the corner, opposite the Grote Kerk, is an Amazing Oriental, one of the three in The Hague. A Chinese chain where you can buy excellent Asian food products for the kitchen: from noodles to rice to seaweed, tempura — everything they have in stock. they have everything you could want. They also have a delicious snack corner where you can get mini spring rolls and breaded shrimp for a great price, and much more.

Japanese/Teppanyaki

We’re now going a bit out of the neighborhood to Scheveningen. There is the only teppanyaki restaurant of The Hague (yes yes, Scheveningen is simply The Hague Beach): Sui Sha Ya. An extremely cozy and excellent Japanese restaurant where your food is prepared in front of you on the grill plate. Very fun to go eat with your children; the Japanese chef will entertain them and shoots pieces of fried egg to the kids that they have to catch with their mouths. The price-quality is good: for €120 you have a 7-course menu that even this glutton is full from, with meat, fish, and vegetables. Here too, you don’t have to be afraid that picky eaters won’t find anything to their liking — everything is on the menu.

Center & atmosphere

Back to my neighborhood. If you walk out of the Piet Heinstraat towards the center and go right, you’ll come to the Paleistuinen, which is actually also a kind of hidden gem: an oasis of peace in the middle of the center, where in the summer a motley group of people peacefully enjoy themselves. Expats, students, loitering youths, tramps, and civil servants, everything sits there mixed together. You can enter through the main entrance opposite the Toussaintkade, and you can exit through a small secret narrow passageway that runs at the back right. There you see a door that seems locked, but there’s a doorbell, and if you press it, the door opens automatically and you come out via a gate and a residential courtyard onto the Molenstraat. If you go right again from here, you will reach, via the Prinsestraat, one of the coziest canals in The Hague: the Veenkade, where there are a few boats moored by the water that serve as terraces for cafés and eateries.

One of these is Niko, a small restaurant with Japanese influence, where you can eat delicious pork belly or sea bass carpaccio for a nice price. They are mainly small bites and tasty cocktails that you can enjoy there, lovely by the water. The owner is simply Dutch, but real Japanese are in the kitchen. The portions are really good and they have delicious drinks, including non-alcoholic ones.

A bit further is Niko Udon, from the same owner, but specialized in udon noodles. The menu is quite extensive. You can eat a delicious shrimp burger there, but also various kushikatsu or tonkatsu.

Now we’re going a bit further into the center. In an alley near the Binnenhof is another hidden gem, not because it’s extremely tasty, but because you can eat delicious Japanese for a great price. This shop is also run by a fairly

young Japanese couple and it’s a restaurant called Ramen Kitonaya and as the name suggests, it is specialized in Ramen. They have there besides Ramen also small bites like Gyoza and Karaage chicken and of course Tonkatsu.

We go back to my neighborhood. If you go right instead of left when you come out of the Molenstraat, you end up at 6&24, a Michelin-worthy restaurant where you can order a 4- to 8-course ‘candy menu’ for around €100 for 8 courses. Again a high-end restaurant in the cozy center.

Right behind it, on the Torenstraat, is the well-known Florencia, an institution that sells coffee for a pittance and became big because of their ice cream. Open from 7:30 AM to 10:00 PM, it’s busy all day and there is a very large terrace that is mainly used by people from The Hague. The ice cream is not fantastic, but quite okay.

If you want special ice cream, you have to go back to the Piet Heinstraat, where my neighbor Piet has an artisan ice cream shop. The whole summer there are long queues in front of the door and he has special flavors and also vegan ice cream.

French & fine dining

We continue with two special restaurants. First, we do Villa Coucou, on the narrow part of the Laan van Meerdervoort. A hidden gem, although they are mentioned in the Michelin Guide. In a beautifully restored building, you eat classic French dishes in the evening, such as Tuna with passion fruit and veal in rosemary sauce. They also have a beautiful bar and you can enjoy a cocktail, cognac, or a glass of wine in a stylish, cozy ambiance.

Another high-end restaurant we have on the Laan van Roos en Doorn, around the corner from NONA. Callas, an institution that has had a Michelin star for 25 years. Here too, they have a classic French kitchen, but definitely nouvelle cuisine, and they serve colorful plates. Think North Sea crab with green apple and celery or Pan-fried sea bass with yellow beetroot and dashi beurre blanc.

And of course, in my Piet Heinstraat, there has also been a beautiful fine dining occasion for a short while now. Marius Wijncafé, the owner of the wine specialty shop, has opened a dining establishment there since 2023 with truly surprisingly nice dishes. What do you think of roasted artichoke with aioli and burnt lemon, or dried tuna with bell pepper, but also loaded fries or chorizo croquettes and many more small bites. Or Sicilian viscouscous (yes yes, mocros, they make it better there than in Morocco).

Sandwich shops

Okay, back to simplicity. The Hague has traditionally been a city where delicious sandwiches are made. The Do family now has two left, but there was a time when they provided half of The Hague with sandwiches with five shops. One of my favorite sandwiches was the “aardbrietje”: a simple hard white roll with brie, bacon, green pepper, and strawberries — a combination of flavors that danced through your mouth when you took a bite. Or the “formateurje”: a half-hard brown roll with ribeye, green asparagus, a freshly boiled quail egg, a hot cherry tomato, stir-fried spinach, and a sambal-tomato dressing. Now there are two left: Ketjes Mix in Poeldijk, where you can eat a simple sandwich with young cheese or fried egg, but also a luxury sandwich, for example with the name “Veilig Verkeer”, with roast beef, ham, fricandeau, pickled meat, and Russian salad. Or another special sandwich — absolutely worth the drive to Poeldijk. The little brother of Ketjes Mix is the origin of the family empire: Broodje van Dootje. That is now located on the Theresiastraat and there you can eat a delicious old-fashioned sandwich with half-om or tartare, or a super tasty satay sandwich. Their absolute top is the sandwich with steak pieces according to a secret family recipe, in various variations. This place is also worth driving to.

Fish

The Hague is located by the sea (yes yes, schollekoppen, you are just part of The Hague). So of course there are excellent fish shops. Fish is very expensive nowadays, so I’ve really looked at price-value.

First, there is, every Thursday on the Prins Hendrikplein, a stall from Toet, where you can get delicious fish for a great price. Of course, as soon as the new herring is there, you have to go eat a herring — our Dutch specialty. But they also have other delicious fish dishes there: from sole to sushi or casseroles. With a very varied assortment, you can go there repeatedly for an excellent meal or a cold fish buffet.

On the Weimarstraat is Het Suezkanaal, a fish shop run by Tunisians where you can get really very cheap, good fish. The assortment may be slightly less extensive or luxurious than at Toet and Simonis, but it’s good and especially cheap.

Simonis is of course an institution in the harbor of Scheveningen: a large, beautiful place with an absurdly large assortment of all kinds of fish. From lobster to sole, from sushi to herring — you’ll find it all here. You can dine there, but don’t put on your best suit, because it’s: place your order at the cash register and then wait until the ladies call your number. “Number 54!” echoes through the place. I now understand where the term ‘fishwife’ comes from. For the locals, Simonis is a bit less; they prefer to go to Roeleveld, a much quieter fish shop where you can also eat delicious sandwiches or sole. Here is where you need to be for smoked eel and other specialties.

Indonesian

Then finally — and this will be an extensive chapter — the Indonesian cuisine. It is world-famous in The Hague. For more than 100 years, The Hague has had Indonesian residents due to our colonial past, and therefore also Indonesian toko’s. I will discuss a number of them.

There is Toko Cendana on the Laan van Meerdervoort: a good toko with the classic assortment. Three types of satay, rice tables, meat dishes like rendang, and side dishes like gado gado. Just an honest, real toko.

Then you have my favorite: De Javaan. A slightly different cuisine than the classic Indonesian — other spices and a bit spicier. The chicken is so spicy, you really have to learn to eat it. I love their chicken cashew and their corn fritters. They also have Javanese chicken wings, very spicy, and Javanese mussels. Check out their menu sometime. This is also more for takeaway than a real restaurant; it’s tiny. You can certainly have a snack there, but it’s more for a quick bite.

And as a finale: again in my own little Piet Heinstraat is Tante Pop, a private thing, just like the Sicilian equivalent Capo Cuccina, but then Javanese. You can order food there every weekend for takeaway or reserve with a group and have a lovely evening including drinks. Tante Pop has her own style: deliciously stewed dishes with mainly lots of vegetables. I would say: order a meal on the weekend and try it out. For €17.50 you have a delicious meal.

Fast food & final note

As a last thing, I’m going to do two things that are actually not allowed. Having already promoted the AH, I’m now going to mention a fast-food chain. Because I’m anything but elitist — I’m an ordinary guy — but when it comes to food, I am food-elitist. But still, I’ll do this one:

Five Guys in the center. Really incredibly tasty hamburgers, with meat as soft as that from McDonald’s, but it does taste like real meat. You can choose all the ingredients yourself and they are fresh; you see them lying in the open kitchen. You don’t need to come here for fries or other sandwiches, but the hamburgers and cheeseburgers are top-notch.

And now a mortal sin for a Hagenees: Amsterdam. We hate it. It’s not far, and the only reason I ever go there is the teppanyaki restaurant in the Okura Hotel, which actually has a Michelin star. Yes, it’s very expensive — the last time we spent €350 per person — but for that we had an omakase sushi platter with ten nigiri that melted in your mouth. They were just as tasty as the ones I tried in Tokyo. And an 8-course menu from the grill plate, of which the wagyu also melted in my mouth, the lobster was buttery soft, and every bite of the whole menu was a true delight. That, along with the tastiest slightly sweet sake I ever drank, is worth it.