Cicci’s - Trattoria & Wine Bar

Where the Canal Meets the Wine List

Groningen's Hoge der A is one of the city's oldest commercial waterways, a narrow canal lined with gabled facades that have housed merchants, workshops, and, more recently, restaurants and bars that have learned to use the address well. The buildings here carry weight — not metaphorically, but architecturally, with low ceilings, thick walls, and the particular stillness that comes from centuries of stone and water working on each other. Arriving at number 3 on a quiet evening, that physical setting does a lot of the work before you've opened a menu.

Cicci's operates as a trattoria and wine bar, a format that has become a reliable shorthand across northern Europe for a specific kind of ambition: serious wine, food that doesn't overwhelm it, and a room that functions as well at 7pm as it does at 10. In Groningen, a university city with a food scene that has been quietly closing the gap with Amsterdam and Utrecht, that combination sits in a distinct tier. The city's wine culture has historically skewed toward beer, as it does across much of the Netherlands north of the rivers, which makes a genuinely curated list here more legible — and more consequential , than it might be in a more saturated market.

The Wine Program and What Star Wine List Recognition Means

The benchmark that matters here is the Star Wine List award, which Cicci's received for 2026. Star Wine List is a guide focused exclusively on wine programs, evaluating lists for range, curation, and the balance between value and depth. Recognition at this level places Cicci's alongside a specific cohort of Dutch wine bars and restaurants that have invested in building something more considered than a regional rotating selection or a list assembled around margin.

In the Netherlands, that peer set includes wine-forward operations in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht , cities with larger dining economies and, correspondingly, larger wine retail and hospitality ecosystems to draw from. For a trattoria in Groningen to earn the same designation signals that the list here is being built with intention, not assembled from a distributor's standard offer. Across the country, venues like Café Barolo in Eindhoven and Florin Utrecht in Utrecht represent the kind of wine-led hospitality that Star Wine List tends to recognise , focused, credentialed, and built around a point of view rather than volume.

The trattoria framing matters for understanding how the wine list is likely positioned. Italian-leaning wine bars tend to organise their lists around regional Italian production, which in serious programs means moving past the Pinot Grigio and Chianti defaults into less-distributed appellations: natural and orange wines from Friuli, skin-contact Sicilians, Etna Rosso from smaller growers, and Abruzzo producers working outside the mainstream Montepulciano d'Abruzzo template. Whether Cicci's list operates in that register is not confirmed by available data, but the Star Wine List designation implies a curation that goes beyond the category basics. For wine-focused visitors, the list itself is the primary reason to book.

Groningen's Dining Scene and Where Cicci's Sits

Groningen has roughly 235,000 residents and a student population that drives the city's hospitality economy toward volume and accessibility. The premium end of the market is smaller than in comparably sized Dutch cities and tends to cluster around a handful of addresses that have managed to hold quality without the scale incentives that Amsterdam restaurants can rely on. The Hoge der A and surrounding canal district represent the densest concentration of serious eating and drinking in the city.

Within that district, Cicci's occupies the wine-bar-with-food tier rather than the destination-restaurant tier. That's a meaningful distinction for how to use it. The format rewards drop-in glasses and extended wine-led evenings more than set-piece dinners. For visitors exploring the canal area, it sits in natural sequence with other addresses along the waterfront. For a broader picture of what the city offers across price points and categories, our full Groningen restaurants guide maps the scene in more detail.

Comparison with wine-bar formats in other Dutch cities is instructive. Door 74 in Amsterdam has built its reputation around technical cocktail programs, representing a different axis of the drinks-led hospitality scene. Brasserie Lalou in Delft operates a French-leaning format that shows how wine bars across the Netherlands have found distinct identities by anchoring to a culinary tradition rather than operating as genre-neutral wine shops with tables. Cicci's Italian framing gives it the same kind of editorial coherence , a list and a kitchen that speak to each other.

Further afield, venues like Bowie in The Hague, Espressobar Kopi Soesoe in Rotterdam, and Het Witte Paard in Etten-Leur illustrate the breadth of the Dutch hospitality market outside the capital , each operating in a specific local context, each making a case for its city's particular character. Cicci's does the same for Groningen: a wine program that meets a national standard, delivered from a canal-side address that the city's geography made possible.

For those approaching from outside the Netherlands, the context widens further. Hotel de Blanke Leading in Cadzand and Boode Foodbar in Bathmen represent how serious hospitality has dispersed into smaller Dutch cities and coastal addresses. Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu shows a different approach entirely, where cocktail craft drives the program rather than wine depth. Cicci's fits the wine-first end of that spectrum.

Planning Your Visit

Hoge der A 3 is in the canal district, walkable from Groningen Centraal station in under fifteen minutes and accessible by bicycle along the city's extensive cycling infrastructure. The trattoria-and-wine-bar format means the space likely operates across lunch and dinner service, though hours are not confirmed in available data and checking directly before visiting is advisable.

Demand at Groningen's better wine addresses tends to concentrate on Thursday through Saturday evenings, when the student and professional populations overlap. For weekend visits, booking ahead reduces the risk of a full room. The Star Wine List recognition for 2026 will likely bring additional traffic from wine-focused visitors, making advance planning more relevant than it was in previous years. Café Lily is another Groningen address worth pairing into the same evening, depending on itinerary.