We’ve rated Le Pantruche as GOOD with two stars * *
You can find all our rankings in the Restaurant Index
Most recent visit in October 2025
I was excited to return to Le Pantruche with a posse of our wonderful food tour guides. We were a group of four and able to order every one of their four starters, mains and desserts.
As a group we agreed that the experience at Le Pantruche would be wildly different depending on what you ordered that night. Ate every course we loved two dishes and strongly disliked the other two.
If you ordered these dishes, you’d probably be thrilled:
But if you opted for these, you might wonder why anyone was promoting Le Pantruche:
Back to the positive: service at Le Pantruche was outstanding and there were many fun bottles to try. The wine list is longer and more interesting at Le Pantruche than at their sibling restaurants Caillebotte and Le Savarin. If you were lucky in ordering the right dishes, shared a beautiful bottle of wine, and finished with a glass of Chartreuse, you might feel like everything was right in the world.
But because of the menu’s variability, and to make room for this group’s newest opening Le Savarin, we’ve removed Le Pantruche from our list of 50 favorites. It remains a very good neighborhood bistro and we recommend going when you want to eat well near Montmartre, especially on a Monday.
LE PANTRUCHE
3 rue Victor Massé, 75009
Open Monday-Friday for lunch & dinner
Closed Saturday & Sunday
Reservations online or at +33 1 48 78 55 60
modern & creative
Open Monday
near Montmartre
Our original review in November 2023
Back in 2011, the food writer Sébastien Demorand visited Le Pantruche and wrote “it’s one of the best bistros I’ve been to in… a long time. That’s it.” He promised blog readers that he would share more about Le Pantruche soon, but he never found the time (he was a little busy judging MasterChef).
Boy, can I relate to this. Not to the television fame but to the intention to write more soon. I always feel the pressure to craft something clever or insightful, when sometimes all that’s needed is a quick endorsement. So let me echo Demorand’s sentiment and say that I went to Le Pantruche and it’s one of the best bistros I’ve been to in a long time.
It wasn’t my first visit - I went with my friend and former co-editor in 2011. Barbra, a former pastry chef, approved of their soufflé au Grand Marnier. I don’t remember much else except that we were happy. Our photos were bad because of the sexy candlelight. A lot of other writers praised Le Pantruche during their opening year, and then the restaurant stopped appearing in the press. But Le Pantruche didn’t stop existing just because we all moved on to write about other things. From what I can tell, this neighborhood bistro has been completely full for more than a decade.
Le Pantruche sits on a small street near the top of the rue des Martyrs, just south of the Montmartre culinary wasteland. If you’re visiting that neighborhood, Le Pantruche is one of your very best options, along with Pétrelle and Aléa (we’ll add it soon to our guide to eating around Montmartre).
Like most bistros, it’s open Monday to Friday and it’s relatively easy to book online with just a few days advance planning. Like most popular spots, they’re now doing two services. In the photo above, you’ll see the crowd lined up outside before Le Pantruche open their doors at 7:30pm. There was another crowd gathered to take our spots at 9:30pm, but we didn’t feel rushed.
Multiple services (early and late seatings) are now utterly common in Paris. The days of having a table for the whole evening are pretty much over, at least for popular places.
The menu at Le Pantruche is modern & creative. Braised oxtail is served with poached oyster, confit leeks and sage gelée (delicious!). They highlight seasonal deer in a ravioli with céléri rémoulade, but make it even more exciting by adding smoked eel and cognac emulsion.
The menu is also a steal, offering three courses at lunch for 23€ and three at dinner for 43€. You can also order à la carte, with all entrées (starters) priced at 13€, all mains at 25€, and all desserts at 10€.
Our mains that evening were more delicious than how they appear in the candlelit photos. But let me assure you, they were delicious. Seasonal pheasant shone in a dish with butternut squash, dried fruit and slivered almonds, and a condiment of cacao nibs and autumn grapes.
Even better was this dish of confit veal shoulder with braised endives, walnut and chestnut purée and shaved pear. Both dishes were brilliantly balanced and pulled together by a sauce or jus that made them feel profoundly delicious (and French).
Desserts at Le Pantruche are not mere afterthoughts. We happily revisited the soufflé au Grand Marnier, served with a lovely drizzle of salted butter caramel sauce.
I also adored the apple and quince tarte Tatin, served a scoop of juniper ice cream atop a dollop of tangy Normandy double cream. I would have happily eaten a larger portion of this, but the prices are so reasonable that I can’t complain.
Le Pantruche has been over-delivering on its modest ambitions for more than a decade. You won’t see it on many top lists today (other than ours) because it’s old news. But old news, in this case, is wonderfully delicious. I strongly recommend it for people searching for modern bistro fare, something near Montmartre, or a place that’s open on Monday. We’ll be including it when we publish our quarterly update of 50 Favorite Restaurants next week, and also when we publish our guide to favorite bistros in January.
STILL SEARCHING?
Our restaurant index organizes the restaurants we’ve anonymously visited since 2021 by location and ranks them all as:
GREAT * * *
GOOD * *
FINE *
NOT RECOMMENDED
This has my mouth watering. Will be going for lunch ❤️🙏🏽
Having read about Pantruche here, we had lunch there in September 2024 after spending the morning walking around Montmartre. Loved the food, atmosphere and service. I wish I had posted comments closer in time so I could remember details. I do remember that we had some kind of souffle for desert that was phenomenal.