Two Montmartres: where to eat and drink on the quiet side

Skip the Place du Tertre crush for the Montmartre two streets away — Coeur Coffee on rue Ravignan, La Maison Rose, LE 975, and how to do Sacré-Cœur properly. We know a place.

Everyone climbs to Place du Tertre and stops there. Keep walking.

There are two Montmartres, running side by side, and most people only ever meet one. The first is the one on the postcards: the painters' square, the portrait easels, the crêpe stands, the coach groups shuffling between them. The second starts about two streets away and is quiet, residential and genuinely beautiful — staircases instead of streets, ivy on stone, a different altitude and a different pace to the rest of Paris.

The trick isn't to avoid the first one. It's to spend forty minutes there, on purpose, and then leave.

The postcard Montmartre, done properly

Place du Tertre is small. You can walk around the whole tourist crush in about four minutes, which is worth knowing before you decide it's ruined. The painters have worked this square for generations, the buildings are real, and on a grey winter morning with the plane trees bare it is still one of the most Parisian places in Paris.

The way to enjoy it is to sit at the edge of it rather than walk through the middle of it.

Au Clairon des Chasseurs, 3 Place du Tertre, has the deep blue frontage and the blue-and-white tables on the cobbles, and it stays open from seven in the morning until two the next. Order a crêpe and an espresso mid-morning, take the outside table facing the easels, and watch the square work. It costs the price of a coffee to have the best seat on the hill.

Next door at number 4, Au Cadet de Gascogne runs continuous service on the same hours and puts live music on every night from eight — piano and voice, or guitar. If you want the square after dark, that's the room. Book through the restaurant's own website rather than a third-party app; a reviewer was recently turned away at the door after booking through one.

Then walk away from the square, downhill, and the second Montmartre starts almost immediately.

Two streets away

Place Émile-Goudeau is five minutes from Place du Tertre and feels like a different arrondissement. A small sloped square reached by stone steps, plane trees, a Wallace fountain, Haussmann facades, and almost no coach traffic at all.

Everything worth knowing about the quiet Montmartre is on one short street running off it.

At 6 rue Ravignan is Coeur Coffee Roasters — about twenty seats, a counter at the front, the menu written on a mirror. Erwan Alonso opened it in June 2024, the year after he won the French national roasting championship, and they roast their own beans twice a week: a dozen or so specialty coffees on rotation, Guatemala and Colombia among them. Open daily from 8am, 9am at weekends. Order the flat white, take a pastry, and don't open a laptop — this is a place for drinking coffee, and the room tells you so.

A few doors up at 12 rue Ravignan is Le Relais de la Butte, green-fronted and strung with festoon lights, its tables tumbling down onto the square. Open daily from eight in the morning until one at night. The house points you at the marinated sardines, the veal cutlet gratinéed with parmesan, and the chocolate cake. Go in the late afternoon, when the sun hits the terrace and the square fills up without ever feeling crowded — it's a genuine mix of Parisians and visitors, which is rare this high up the hill.

On one side of that square is the Bateau-Lavoir, at number 13. This is where Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Be clear about what you'll actually find: the original timber building burned down in 1970 and was rebuilt in 1978, and it still houses around twenty-five working artists' studios. You can't go in. What you get is the listed facade and a shopfront window full of old photographs of the building's Picasso-era life. That's it — and standing on the square reading them is better than it sounds.

Five minutes north, Rue de l'Abreuvoir runs downhill in a curve that has been photographed more than almost any street in Paris, and on its corner sits La Maison Rose — a small pink building with sage-green shutters, festoon lights across the front, ivy climbing the building next door. It has been pink since around 1908, when Germaine Gargallo, a model in Picasso's circle, opened it as a café. Utrillo painted it, which is why the image feels familiar before you've ever seen it.

The kitchen is not the reason to come; the corner table is. But two practical things matter more here than anywhere else on the hill, because this is a tiny restaurant that a very large number of people turn up at expecting to walk into. It's closed Monday and Tuesday. And lunch and dinner are reservation-only, through their own website — the exception being tea and drinks from 15:30 to 17:30, which needs no booking. That window is the answer for most people.

Dinner, over the back of the hill

The best meal up here isn't on the hill at all. LE 975 sits at 185 rue Marcadet, behind the Butte, out towards Guy Môquet — twenty-odd minutes' walk from Place du Tertre, or the métro to Guy Môquet or Lamarck–Caulaincourt.

Taïki Tamao cooks and Mathieu Orazi runs the room and the wine. Tamao trained at the Taiwa school in Kyoto, chose French cooking at nineteen, and worked his way through Guy Savoy's Les Bouquinistes and then — this is the part that matters here — the kitchens of Moulin de la Galette and Le Chamarré Montmartre, a few streets from where he now cooks. The food is French with Japanese and Spanish accents, the kitchen is open, and the blackboard is rewritten every day on what the market gave up that morning.

Lunch is a €25 weekday formula. Dinner is a five-course menu at €59, chef's choice, or à la carte. Gault&Millau scores it 13.5 and calls it one to watch.

Two things to plan around: it's open Monday to Friday only — closed Saturday and Sunday, which catches people out — and it shuts for the first three weeks of August. Book through their own site.

Where to stay

There is no hotel on the Butte we'd send you to, so go to the bottom of the hill instead.

Hôtel Massé opened in September 2025 at 32 bis rue Victor Massé, in South Pigalle — the 9th, not the 18th, at the southern foot of Montmartre. Juliette Gasparetto and Julie Parenti, who met working at the architecture practice Festen, built it as a family venture and designed the interiors themselves: forty rooms in a Haussmannian building, honey-toned wood, okoumé and maritime pine, sloped attic ceilings on the top floors, balconies and zinc-rooftop views.

Downstairs, Trente is open to anyone, not just guests — Tuesday to Saturday, 5pm until 2am, vinyl on the deck, natural wine, sharing plates. Order the Brioche Trente.

Pigalle is on lines 2 and 12, two minutes from the door and one stop from Abbesses, so the hill is a short ride or a steep and pretty walk. One honest warning: guests have flagged street-facing rooms as noisy, with the bar downstairs. Ask for something at the back.

What to do up here besides Sacré-Cœur

You should still do Sacré-Cœur. The white basilica on the highest hill in Paris is free to enter and open from 6:30 in the morning until 22:30 at night, and inside there's one of the largest mosaics in the world glowing over the apse and a silence that somehow survives the crowds.

But the steps outside are the actual show — buskers, picnics, and the whole city stacked to the horizon. Morning before 9:30 for the basilica; golden hour for the steps. Two visits, if you can spend them.

The dome is a separate ticket, around €8 for adults and about 300 steps with no lift. Its hours shift with the season and the weather, so check on the day rather than trusting anything you read in advance — including this.

Three more things on the hill that reward the walk.

The vineyard. Paris still has a working vineyard, the Clos Montmartre, on the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint-Vincent, opposite the Lapin Agile. It's about 1,500 square metres and makes roughly 1,500 bottles a year of Pinot Noir and Gamay. It's locked for most of the year, so almost everyone sees it through the railings — which is fine, and is the only time most people notice there are vines in the middle of Paris at all. The exception is the harvest weekend each October, when the picking happens in public and the whole 18th turns out for it.

Musée de Montmartre, 12 rue Cortot. Open daily from 10am, around €16, and its Renoir Gardens look straight down over that vineyard. If you only want the gardens there's a cheaper garden-only ticket.

The windmills. Thirty-odd once stood up here and two survive, both on Rue Lepic. Neither interior can be visited. The Moulin Radet marks the entrance to the restaurant now trading as Moulin de la Galette at 83 rue Lepic; the older Blute-fin is on private land and can only be seen from the street. Worth the detour to look, not worth building a morning around.

Getting up the hill

Montmartre is steep in a way photographs flatten. It is genuinely a hill, and a lot of it is staircases rather than streets.

Two approaches, and they give you completely different days. Come up from Anvers and you get the funicular, the long lawns and the grand front-on approach to the basilica — the arrival everyone pictures. Come up from Lamarck–Caulaincourt on line 12 and you arrive on the quiet north side, near the vineyard, and walk up through the residential lanes with almost nobody around.

Arrive at Anvers if it's your first time. Arrive at Lamarck if it isn't.

How we'd spend a day

Up from Lamarck–Caulaincourt in the morning, past the vineyard railings and up through the back lanes. Sacré-Cœur before 9:30, while the basilica is still quiet. Down to rue Ravignan for a flat white at Coeur Coffee. Crêpe and an espresso at Au Clairon des Chasseurs with the painters setting up. Then Rue de l'Abreuvoir, tea at La Maison Rose in the no-booking window, and back to Place Émile-Goudeau to read the Bateau-Lavoir windows. Late afternoon on the terrace at Le Relais de la Butte while the sun crosses the square. Basilica steps for golden hour, with the whole city underneath. Then over the back of the hill to LE 975, if it's a weekday.

Two Montmartres. Give the first one forty minutes. Give the second one the rest of the day.

We know a place.