Cucina Soho in The Hague is a pleasant place (with some points for improvement)

In the vast majority of restaurants, the person who prepares the food for the guests remains unknown. But there are also things where the chef constantly catches the eye: on the plate, in front of the screen, or in the background. Ricardo van Ede belongs to the latter category, and since I’ve been following him (my first review once was about his restaurant Ricardo’s in Amsterdam) I sometimes wonder whether this is primarily due to his special way of cooking or because of his special appearance.

Van Ede is never just Van Ede, but always ‘the striking chef Ricardo van Ede’, ‘the eccentric Ricardo van Ede’, a bear of a guy with a gray beard, piercings, blue tattoos from chin to calf and saucers in his earlobes . His rugged appearance also contrasts wonderfully with a soft, searching way of speaking and the glance and apologetic smile of a shy child. Someone you don’t overlook, nor soon forget.

The disadvantage of being conspicuous is that you can never make a few mistakes unnoticed. After Ricardo’s in Odeon had to close to his great sadness, he made all kinds of wanderings through restaurants in the capital: nothing longer than a few months, because nothing really fit. Four years ago he moved to The Hague, following his Italian lover: he said in an interview, he never wants to return to Amsterdam. Now he has opened a trattoria.

Cucina Soho is housed in a chic building around the corner from Het Plein, but nowhere does it seem to pretend to be more than a very nice neighborhood Italian with classic dishes, good wine and good stuff: that’s nice. On the menu we see some well-chosen appetizers (prosciutto, bacon with walnuts, almonds), a row of antipasti, two pastas and four main courses. The space is also in no way garish or conspicuous: a calm, light design with brick walls, bulb lamps and high windows, the kitchen is in the middle and a large courtyard garden at the back. A rather clichéd Italian playlist is heard over the speakers, on which Eros Ramazzotti, Zucchero and Paolo Conte alternately warble, reverberate and growl.

Ten wines from Etna

The very young waiters are nice and helpful, but it is noticeable that the service still lacks experience and expertise. Our wine glass is covered in lipstick, we have to ask for water three times. After a repeated, concrete request for an explanation of the extensive and almost completely Italian wine list, it appears that only Van Ede knows the wines himself – and he is behind the pans. I love that a restaurant like this has a wine list with, you name it, ten wines from the red nerello grapes that grow on the Sicilian Etna. But if there isn’t one well-established staff member who can tell you something about what makes those different wines unique, such a card remains a closed bastion, and that is a shame. Finally, through the waiter, Van Ede recommends the extremely fine, spicy-earthy nerello cappuccio from Benanti from 2017 (€ 57) and it all ends well. Still, someone with more ‘front-end’ experience would do the job well – we’re aware that it’s very hard to find at the moment (see box).

Vitello tonnato is a classic northern Italian dish of poached, thinly sliced ​​veal, served at room temperature with a creamy tuna sauce. At Cucina Soho, Van Ede doesn’t make it with vitello but with maiale (€10), freshly cut pork tenderloin, juicy and beautiful light pink. He garnishes the fine sauce with capers and the yellow inner leaves of celery. Simple but effective. There is also a bruschetta with octopus, tomatoes and olives, on the menu as ‘polpo à la Luciano (€12)’, but the dish is called alla luciana† to the Neapolitan fishing district of Santa Lucia. The taste is excellent, there is fennel seed and a pepper in it, and also some pieces of potato that are always so nice with octopus in terms of texture.

Sopressata Toscana (€10) is a kind of terrine made from pork head with spices. I think it’s great fun that Van Ede makes preskop himself, but the portion is so huge and the meat so gray and above all so terribly cold that eating the three hard ice hockey pucks actually annoys us from the first bite. It’s served with oil, balsamic vinegar, and fried pimientos de Padrón (green, mild northern chilli peppers), and that, too, seems puzzling to us.

Points of improvement

The pastas can be ordered as before/between meals and as a main course, and a small portion of orechiette with scampi (€14) turns out to be more than enough for two. Orechiette Napolitane, even more than the common orechiette, resemble auricles; Van Ede serves them in a lobster bisque. In Italy, you usually get shellfish pasta in a spicy tomato sauce, or with oil, garlic and white wine. I also think that fits better: in a creamy bisque I want a crispy crouton, not a soft paste that makes things soggy and heavy. The taste is again good.

As a main course there is lamb tongue (€19) served with beautiful cream-colored cannellini beans, stewed and then baked artichokes, a light tomato sauce and cime di rapa: tasty Italian turnip greens (more like stem broccoli with leaves). All in all a nice rustic dish and very tasty. Tender braised pork cheek (€24) is served with very good gravy and chard on a huge portion of steaming snow-white risotto. In its bland pulpiness it comes across as unpleasantly rice pudding; I would rather have either better risotto or something like polenta or mashed potatoes.

For dessert there is a fine slice of heavy, flourless chocolate cake with generously roasted hazelnuts (€8) and we also order the panna cotta (€8). That should be a dessert of reduced cream with sugar and a little gelatin, but what we get is a buttermilk pudding in a glass. Quite tasty, but certainly at the end of a meal like this it also feels a bit as if the person who has been feeding you lemonade glasses of vodka all evening suddenly starts pouring you unsolicited non-alcoholic beer at the end of the evening. I ordered reduced cream, friend, give me reduced cream.

Cucina Soho is a pleasant place with some room for improvement, but also with more than enough character to handle it easily. We hope that Van Ede can take root here.