Where to Eat in Montmartre: Tried and Tested Addresses
The question I get most often at our cooking school, is where to eat in Montmartre. So here is the (usually handwritten) list I give to people. The places I eat at or send people to, ordered by how far each one is from our front door at 6 rue Baudelique. The first few addresses are one’s that I can reach from the cooking school before my coffee goes cold. The last few involve a climb. The Butte has two faces and we are on the north one, along with Jules Joffrin and rue Ramey. The Montmartre most people picture, meaning the Sacré-Cœur and Place du Tertre and Abbesses and Pigalle, sits over the top on the south side.
Fana
Fana is a bistronomic restaurant at 14 rue Ferdinand Flocon and it is the closest thing on this list to our door. Chef Eric Fraudeau (founder of Cook’n With Class) has tested this one out on more than a few occasions and wrote up a full review of his first time there. There is a Michelin Bib Gourmand on the wall, the menu moves with the season, and the pastry side of the kitchen is doing at least as much work as the savoury side.
The street was pedestrianised a few years back, so the terrace is calm in a way that almost nothing else at this end of the 18th manages. I have never once walked in without booking and been given a table.
Read Chef Eric’s review of Fana
14 rue Ferdinand Flocon, 75018. About 3 minutes from us. Lunch menus from around €25 and about €45 in the evening. Book ahead or try your luck.
Jules Jo
Jules Jo is a French brasserie at 28 rue Hermel, on the street I walk down to get to work. It opens early in the morning and runs very late, which makes it the answer whenever your day has failed to line up with French service hours. If you have ever arrived in Paris at four in the afternoon and discovered that no kitchen wants anything to do with you until seven, this is where you go.
The menu is wide enough to suit a lot of different tastes. Pizzas at one end and roasted mains at the other, with seasonal soups and charcuterie and cheese boards holding the middle. It works.
28 rue Hermel, 75018. About 4 minutes from us. Roughly €16 to €55. Walk in for two, call ahead for six or more.
Le Nord Sud
Nord Sud is a traditional brasserie at 79 rue du Mont-Cenis. There are plats du jour on a board, which is where I look before anything else. Calf’s liver with a balsamic jus and potato purée was on it recently, along with a salmon and spinach quiche, and there is usually a tarte tatin for afterwards.
A full meal lands around €25. The same plates a few hundred metres up the hill at Place du Tertre will cost you considerably more and taste like considerably less. The room fills with people who live here rather than people passing through, which is usually the only review I need. There is a terrace, which matters for about four months of the year and is deeply theoretical the rest of the time.
79 rue du Mont-Cenis, 75018. About 6 minutes from us. Around €25. Worth calling for dinner at the weekend.
Pagaille
Pagaille is at 46 rue Ramey and it is the newest of four places worth eating at on this one street. The chef trained at Mirazur in Menton, the kind of line that usually comes with prices to match, but this place keeps prices reasonable. Lunch is around €22 and the cooking looks south, toward Provence and Liguria and Catalonia.
The menu changes often enough that I have given up recommending dishes and now just order whatever is on the board. Weekday evenings are a neighbourhood dinner. Friday and Saturday there is a DJ and you will be shouting across the table by dessert, so choose your night according to what you want out of it.
46 rue Ramey, 75018. About 8 minutes from us. Lunch around €22. Reserve, especially at the weekend.
Atelier Ramey
Atelier Ramey is at 23 rue Ramey and it is the grown-up of the four on this street. Ten years and more in the same room, currently under chef Nicolas Boissière, with exposed brick and a glass panel in the floor so you can stand there looking down at the wine cellar like a person who knows about wine.
The menu is short and seasonal. Beef carpaccio and haddock brandade turn up regularly. The braised ham hock is best to order if you want to understand what a long slow French braise is supposed to be like, which is fall apart at the sight of a fork.
23 rue Ramey, 75018. About 11 minutes from us. Lunch formula around €19 and an evening tasting menu around €32. Reserve for dinner.
La Mère Catherine
Now we go over the hill to a historic choice.
La Mère Catherine sits at 6 place du Tertre and was founded in 1793, which makes it the oldest restaurant still trading on the square. The building was the presbytery of the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre until the Revolution, when the state seized it and sold it to Catherine Lamotte. She turned it into a café and then a restaurant, drank with her customers instead of serving them from a polite distance, and ended up as everybody’s Mère Catherine.
There is a plaque by the door with the story most people come for. On 30 March 1814, with Paris occupied after Napoleon’s defeat, Russian Cossacks stationed on the Butte are supposed to have banged on the counter demanding drinks and shouting “bystro”, Russian for quickly. The word stuck. That, says the plaque, is why a bistro is called a bistro.
The 1793 founding is documented and solid. The etymology is not. Linguists mostly file it under folk etymology, largely because the word does not appear in written French until the 1880s, which is seven decades after the Cossacks went home and a long time for a word to sit around saying nothing. No one has come up with a better origin story, so this one may have outlived its evidence.
Place du Tertre is the most visitor-facing corner of Montmartre and the prices know it. Order simply. Onion soup or a steak will not let you down. Go at breakfast or mid-afternoon when the square has thinned out and the portrait painters are still setting up, and take a table outside.
If the bistro question interests you past their plaque, the cooking behind it is learnable in an evening. Our Bistro Cooking Class runs five hours and teaches you how to create a three-course menu of the bistro classics with one of our chefs, and you eat the results at the chef’s table with bread and wine.
6 place du Tertre, 75018. About 18 minutes from us, most of it uphill. Open 7am to 2am daily. Walk in.
Le Potager du Père Thierry, Mamie Colette and La Vache et le Cuisinier
These three sit within about fifteen metres of each other on rue des Trois Frères, which means you can stand on one short stretch of pavement and decide where to eat by passing by each of them.
Le Potager du Père Thierry at number 16 is a casual one. Small and warm, checkered table cloths and not interested in being pretentious. Duck is the house strength, served with honey or with raspberry sauce depending on the day.
Mamie Colette at number 17 runs a grandmother’s-kitchen idea, which in practice means everything is made on site, but the deco is actually pretty alternative and cool. The beef bourguignon has a local reputation as one of the better ones in Paris and the best part is that it comes with aligot! Aligot is absolutely the reason to go in.
La Vache et le Cuisinier at number 18 is the sibling that owns a nice shirt. Semi-gastronomique cooking with Southwest French flavours and good cuts of meat. The lamb and the quail with lavender & honey sauce are both great.
16, 17 and 18 rue des Trois Frères, 75018. About 20 minutes from us. Casual at 16 and 17, higher at 18. All three are small, you can book but typically you can pass by and find a place to sit.
Le Sancerre
Le Sancerre is a recently renovated Art Deco brasserie at 35 rue des Abbesses, on one of the busiest streets up here. The menu is classic brasserie. Onion soup and escargots and duck breast, plus a burger that has built its own following without much help.
It runs from early morning until around 2am most nights, which makes it the answer when every kitchen on this list has closed and you have not eaten. This is a walk-in address rather than a destination, and it is better for it.
35 rue des Abbesses, 75018. About 22 minutes from us. Walk in.
Les Fines Lames
Les Fines Lames is a meat-focused bistro at 35 rue Lepic and the theme is fully committed. Butcher tools on the walls. Knives set into the tabletops. Half-barrels overhead. It is a lot, and then the entrecôte arrives and you stop noticing.
Order the steak. Get the bone marrow to start. The sides are made in house rather than bought in, which you can taste. There are 34 seats, so it gets loud when full, and weekday lunch specials make it workable with children.
Rue Lepic is worth a minute of your attention on its own. It runs as a market street at the lower end, Van Gogh lived at number 54 with his brother Theo, and the café from Amélie is at number 15.
35 rue Lepic, 75018. About 22 minutes from us. Mid-range, with weekday lunch specials as the value option. Small room, so reserve for dinner.
Bouillon Pigalle
Bouillon Pigalle is at 22 boulevard de Clichy, at the bottom of the hill and the far end of this list. A bouillon is a specific Parisian format going back to the 1850s. Traditional French dishes at low prices and high volume with no reservations taken, which is why there is always a queue and why the queue moves faster than you expect.
Chef Eric has written all about the Paris bouillons and affordable dining already, so start there if the idea appeals: Paris bouillon restaurants.
22 boulevard de Clichy, 75018. About 25 minutes from us. Most mains under €15. No bookings. Expect to queue.
Quick food lunch spots:
Breizh Café Abbesses
Breizh Café Abbesses is a Breton crêperie at 93 rue des Martyrs, on the corner with rue Yvonne Le Tac at the foot of the hill. This one is Chef Sarah’s pick for crêpes/galettes in Paris.
The galettes are what you should go for when looking to get lunch in Paris, made with buckwheat flour from Brittany and organic ingredients. Order a complète if it is your first time. The cider list is long and properly Breton and comes in the traditional bolée, which is a small bowl and takes some getting used to but it’s the best way to drink cider. The owner spent years in Japan and a few touches from that period turn up on the menu.
93 rue des Martyrs, 75018. About 23 minutes from us. Around €10 to €16 a galette.
Land & Monkeys
Land & Monkeys at 28 rue Ramey is a bakery and café where everything is vegan, and the thing that catches people out is the viennoiserie. Lamination without butter should not work nearly as well as it does. I have handed a croissant from here to people who did not know and did not ask.
Breads and croissants and pain au chocolat in the morning. Sandwiches and quiches later. It is closed on Wednesdays, a fact I have now learned the hard way on three separate occasions.
This is also where I put the other kind of stop, the one where you do not want a restaurant at all. Any of the boulangeries along rue du Mont-Cenis or rue Ramey will sell you a jambon-beurre for a few euros, and eating that on a bench is a completely legitimate lunch in this city. Nobody will think less of you.
If you are working around a restricted diet more generally, Chef Sarah wrote a pastry chef’s guide to Paris with dietary restrictions, and this is the Montmartre answer to it.
28 rue Ramey, 75018. About 10 minutes from us. A few euros for viennoiserie and around €10 for a big sandwich. Walk in. Closed Wednesdays.
These are just a few of the quick bites and street food in Paris you can find, there’s more in Montmartre and further out.
And more, a bit different to your classic French cuisine
Sosso
Sosso is a Mediterranean and Lebanese place further down rue Ramey at number 36, set up by three partners called Olivier and Quentin and Tristan. It’s best if you over-order and put everything in the middle of the table, which I consider a feature.
The baba ghannouj goes first every time. The feta with zaatar is the one I forget to order and then regret. If you want a single dish to build the meal around, make it the shish tawook.
36 rue Ramey, 75018. About 9 minutes from us. Mid-range and it scales with how much you order. Reserve on a Friday or Saturday.
Colchide
Colchide is a family-run Georgian (🇬🇪) restaurant and wine cellar at 79 rue des Martyrs, fourteen doors down from Breizh Café. It is not French and it is not here to round out a number. It is here because Georgian food is unlike anything else in Europe and this is the most interesting meal you can get within walking distance of the Sacré-Cœur.
The kitchen has been going since 2013 and opened this address in 2019. Order the khachapuri, a cheese bread that comes in several regional versions. The adjaruli one arrives boat-shaped with a raw egg and a lump of butter sitting in a well at the centre, which you stir into the hot cheese at the table and which is exactly as good as that sounds. Then khinkali, large pleated dumplings filled with meat and broth, eaten by hand and never with a fork. The nigvziani badrijani is grilled aubergine rolled around spiced walnut paste and it is the one people go back for.
The wine list is Georgian, including bottles aged in qvevri, the buried clay vessels that make amber wine what it is.
If a plate of khachapuri leaves you curious about Georgia beyond one dinner, our sister brand Let’s Eat The World runs an eight-day culinary trip to Tbilisi and the Georgian countryside. Same table, considerably longer version.
79 rue des Martyrs, 75018. About 24 minutes from us. Mid-range and built for sharing. Small room, so reserve for dinner.
Come and cook!
Most people get to one or two of these on a trip and never reach the rest, which is fine. But if you would rather understand why a French kitchen works the way it does than only taste the result, our French Market Tour and Cooking Class starts at the market a few streets from our door and finishes with you eating what you cooked. Taught in English, hands-on from the first minute, and you will never look at a fennel bulb the same way again.
Where to eat in Montmartre FAQs
For dinner, usually yes. Most of the good rooms up here are small and several on this list seat fewer than forty people. Brasseries like Le Sancerre and Jules Jo take walk-ins without any trouble. Bouillon Pigalle does not take bookings at all, so the queue is the system.
Depends entirely where you stand. Around Place du Tertre and the streets immediately under the Sacré-Cœur you pay a premium for the postcode. Walk ten minutes north toward rue Ramey or the Mairie du 18e and lunch formulas run between €19 and €25 for cooking that is frequently better.
Off the summit. Rue Ramey and rue des Trois Frères and the streets around the Mairie du 18e are where the neighbourhood goes. My rule of thumb is that if a restaurant has photographs of the food outside and someone trying to catch your eye as you pass, keep walking. The deliberate exception on this list is La Mère Catherine, which is on the square and earns its place on history rather than cooking.
There is no single Montmartre dish. What the neighbourhood has instead is density. Traditional bistro cooking around the Mairie du 18e on the north side. A run of newer kitchens along rue Ramey. Breton galettes and a bouillon at the foot of the south side. All of it inside a twenty-minute walk.