The smell hits you before anything else on Lange Voorhout — charcoal smoke curling off satay grills, the sweet-sharp tang of sambal, someone’s kroket frying two stalls down. This is Jalan Pedis, the culinary spine of Jalan Jalan festival, and for three days in August it turns one of The Hague’s grandest streets into something closer to a Jakarta night market — if a Jakarta night market had also absorbed seventy years of Dutch history along the way.

Indonesian roots, Dutch soil, something entirely its own is exactly what Jalan Pedis, the food festival at the heart of the wider Jalan Jalan organisation, is built to hold. Vanja van der Leeden, one of its organizers shares her hopes for the festival and beyond. Vanja is a chef and cookbook author, and when I sat down with her, I expected a straightforward conversation about food. What I got instead was a family history that doubles as a history of this city’s largest, quietest diaspora.

Vanja grew up in The Hague of Indisch origin — the term for the mixed Dutch-Indonesian community that has shaped this city since the mid-20th century, when hundreds of thousands of people left the newly independent Indonesia for a Netherlands many of them had never actually lived in. Her grandmother, she told me, wasn’t much of a cook. Her mother cooked, but only ever from recipes — nothing improvised, nothing passed down by feel. What Vanja absorbed growing up was Indisch cooking: the Dutch-Indies hybrid cuisine that Indo families built for themselves after arriving here, working with whatever ingredients they could find, filling the gap where a formal food culture for their community simply didn’t exist yet.

It’s a detail that says more about this city than any timeline could. The Hague earned the nickname “Weduwe van Indië” — Widow of the Indies — because so many repatriates from the former Dutch East Indies settled here after 1949, and especially after Indonesia’s more nationalist turn in the late 1950s pushed out remaining Dutch nationals. You can still read it in the street names of the Archipelbuurt — Javastraat, Sumatrastraat — and in the toko shelves stocked with ingredients that had nowhere else to exist in Dutch supermarkets. But Vanja’s story is a reminder that what took root here wasn’t a transplanted Indonesian cuisine. It was something new, built from memory, scarcity, and improvisation. Indisch food, not Indonesian food — a distinction that matters more than it might sound.

What she didn’t grow up with, Vanja went looking for later. She travelled to Indonesia and spent time learning from some of the country’s most respected chefs — encountering, in many cases for the first time, the cooking her own family’s version had been adapted from. She brought that research home and eventually shaped it into a cookbook: Indo Rock, named for the food and the music of the Indo-Dutch community — a nod to the genre Indo musicians helped build in the Netherlands in the 1950s and 60s, guitars and all, as well as how Vanja is bringing some rock n roll to cooking. It’s a neat structure for a life’s work: grow up on the adapted version, go find the source, then write the book that puts them in conversation with each other. In fact, Vanja brought her copy of Indo Rock to our meeting for exactly this reason — to show, concretely, how a traditional recipe can move into the present without losing what makes it what it is.

That balancing act is really the whole culinary mission behind Jalan Pedis. Vanja was careful to spell it out: this isn’t only an Indisch food festival. The ambition is to show the full breadth of the diaspora’s cuisines side by side — Indisch, Indonesian, Moluccan, Papuan, Surinamese-Javanese, Peranakan — and to give more room than usual to Indonesia’s own vast regional variety, which rarely gets represented in full outside the archipelago itself. Memory and nostalgia matter deeply here — Vanja’s own story makes that obvious — but she’s just as focused on the third and fourth generation: the visitors and creators who are taking these cuisines somewhere new. Knowing where the food comes from, in other words, without treating that as the end of the story. The world will continue to evolve and grow and it only makes sense that this food and its chefs, evolve and grow with it.

Vanja wants Jalan Pedis to grow — not just in size, but in what it’s asking of the people who show up. Her hope is straightforward: that each year, it pulls a few more people into actually understanding the community and the history behind the food, rather than just eating it. Last year’s smaller preview, a single afternoon of Jalan Pedis on Lange Voorhout, drew far more visitors than organizers expected — toko and Indisch restaurants across the city reportedly saw the overflow. This year’s expanded, three-day edition of the broader Jalan Jalan Festival, spread across Filmhuis Den Haag, Museum Sophiahof, GR8, and Pulchri Studio, felt like the festival catching up to the appetite that was already there.

Standing on Lange Voorhout with a paper plate of nasi, it’s easy to just enjoy the festival as a festival — good food, good music, a packed street on a warm August evening. And that’s fine. But talking to Vanja, I kept coming back to her grandmother, the one who wasn’t much of a cook, and her mother, cooking carefully from recipes because nothing else had been handed down. Somewhere between them and Vanja’s cookbook is the story of an entire community rebuilding a cuisine — and by extension an identity — from scratch, in a country that didn’t always make space for it to happen.

Jalan Jalan, at its best, is that rebuilding made visible for a weekend. And if Vanja gets her way, it’ll only get bigger from here.

Who was cooking at Jalan Pedis

Part of what makes the festival worth returning to year after year is the sheer range on offer — home cooks alongside restaurant kitchens, Moluccan specialities next to fusion experiments. Here’s who was serving this year:

• Food tuk — Saté ajam / babi / kambing / tempeh as full portions, with lontong, atjar, homemade satésaus, fried onions, kentang, and pandan cake
• Gina Bratawidjaja — Homemade Indonesian iced drinks, including ijs rujak pedis, ijs tjendol durian, ijs campur, ijs klepon, ijs kelapa muda/dawet, and ijs aardbei
• Saté Bar on Tour (from restaurant Sarinande in The Hague) — Everything off the BBQ: ikan bakar, half chicken, ribs, saté
• Blije Boon — Coffee, iced coffee, homemade lemonade
• Taste of Maluku  — Ikan goreng colo-colo with papeda/rice, asam pedis with papeda/rice, the Taste of Maluku bowl, snacks, rujak, maize cake, and lemper
• Alex Meza: Friet van Fiets — Loaded fries with rendang, gado-gado (vegetarian), babi guling, or ayam besengek
• Senang Catering Breda — Saté spek, saté kambing, gado-gado, lemper, risolles, loempia, rendang sandwiches, daging smoor, fried potatoes
• Ins&Outs Catering — Pisang goreng, lemper and an Indo bar platter (maize cakes, loempia, pangsit, pastei, and more)
• Organisatie Jalan Jalan — The Jalan Bites bus, serving fusion bites like Indo tostadas with chicken rendang and acar, spicy aubergine with basil, and salmon with Balinese sambal matah, alongside babi pangang ribs with mango sambal and pecel made from roasted pointed cabbage with lontong and krupuk
• Indische curryworst — A caterer from Uitgeest
• Coffee on Wheels (Mark Zevenbergen, Kim Padding) — Coffee truck and warm drinks
• De Indo / Hangry Foodtruck (from Scheveningen) — Sandwiches and sate
• El Careto – pandan tiramisu fusion from the mobile chef often found on Lange Voorhout

Vanja’s picks for Indonesian food beyond the festival

If Jalan Jalan leaves you wanting more, Vanja’s own go-to spots are a good place to start — a mix of Hague institutions and Amsterdam detours:

• Warung Lapek Jo (The Hague)
• De Javaan (The Hague)
• Trio Eethuis (The Hague)
• Martabak House (The Hague)
• Paon Bali (Amsterdam)
• Warung Pas (Amsterdam)
• Warung Indonesia (Haagse Markt)

Follow Vanja on Instagram and grab one of her cookbooks here

Jalan Jalan 2027 is taking place 20 – 22 August. For more info on the festival: https://jalanjalanfestival.nl/

Photos provided by: Vanja van der Leeden on behalf of photographers Nina Akollo, Hans Mahler and Rosa van Leeuwen

Do you have a story about your own café, restaurant or bar in the city? Reach out to sherika@thehagueonline.com to possibly be featured.

Sherika Rooplal-Clappers is a contributing writer for The Hague Online, covering culture, lifestyle, and local events. With a passion for storytelling and international perspectives, she highlights the people, places, and experiences that make The Hague a dynamic city. 

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