About Me

I was born and raised in The Netherlands and moved to the United States in 1995. Almost immediately, I missed the food from my home country. Since I enjoyed cooking, I would make the dishes that I knew and loved from my childhood. Often I would call my mom to find out exactly how she used to make something. I’d also run into challenges trying to find the right ingredients.

I remember, as a small boy, that I wanted to become a chef. Soon I realized that I am too picky an eater for that career path. So, instead, I became a product manager at an electronics and software company. Cooking and photography became my hobbies, instead.

With the rise of social media, I often posted photos of what I made. My friends and family all encouraged me to start making cooking videos and a recipe blog. However, I never took it too seriously; after all, the Dutch aren’t well-known for their food, so the dishes couldn’t be that interesting to other people.

For work, my coworkers and I would spend a week or two in Amsterdam, and I became the de facto tour and food guide. We would go to traditional Dutch, modern Dutch, and Indonesian restaurants; they were all exceptionally well received by everyone attending. This is when I realized that the food of The Netherlands has more appeal than I had given it credit for. Clearly, there was interest beyond The Netherlands for Dutch food. However, I was too busy to start a YouTube channel and food blog.

We’ve been spending much more time at home since the pandemic started. With the extra time, I started planning to create this website and my YouTube channel!

Why Dutch Food?

The honest answer is that nobody else was doing it. When I started Toine’s Kitchen, there was almost no English-language content about Dutch cooking. Plenty of people were making Italian, French, and Mexican food, but Dutch food was this gap that nobody had filled. That felt wrong to me, because Dutch food is genuinely good.

The Netherlands has a long history of trade, which means its cooking absorbed influences from all over the world. You can see it in the spices: ingredients like cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom show up in Dutch baking because the Dutch East India Company was once the world’s dominant spice trader. You can taste it in dishes like zuurvlees, a sour beef stew from Limburg that has roots in Belgian cuisine, or kerststol, the Dutch Christmas bread loaded with marzipan.

There’s also a whole category of food that developed from the Dutch colonial relationship with Indonesia — dishes that ended up becoming deeply woven into everyday Dutch cooking. Nasi goreng, satay, and rijsttafel are not considered exotic in the Netherlands; they’re just dinner.

People who have visited the Netherlands and eaten at the market or a good Dutch restaurant tend to be surprised by how much they enjoyed the food. I want to help recreate that for people who live outside the Netherlands and can’t easily find a Dutch bakery or a good kroket.

Why Indonesian Food?

I served in the Dutch Navy, and one thing the Navy did every single Wednesday was serve Indonesian food. This is not a myth or a nostalgia story — it was a real tradition, and it meant that by the time I left the Navy I had eaten a lot of Indonesian cooking and had strong opinions about what good rendang or nasi goreng was supposed to taste like.

Indonesia was a Dutch colony from the 1600s until 1945. The culinary connection between the two countries runs deep. Indonesian restaurants are a fixture of Dutch cities, and dishes like satay and nasi goreng are as Dutch as bitterballen in the sense that most Dutch people grew up eating them regularly. When I make Indonesian food on this channel, it comes from that Dutch-Indonesian lens — the way these dishes were eaten in the Netherlands, not as a definitive statement about Indonesian cuisine itself.

I want to be clear about that: I’m not Indonesian, and I don’t claim to make the most authentic Indonesian versions of these dishes. What I make is the Indonesian food that ended up in Dutch homes and Dutch Navy ships — which is its own real tradition worth preserving.