Biscotte – the sixteen-seat bistro run by a chef and a pastry chef in love

On a quiet stretch of rue Desnouettes, two streets from the exhibition halls of Porte de Versailles in the 15th arrondissement, Biscotte proves that ambition needs little more than sixteen seats and an open flame. The room is run entirely by its founders, Maximilien Jancourt in the kitchen and Pauline Moreau on desserts, a couple who met inside some of Paris's grandest dining rooms before opening a place of their own in the summer of 2018. There is no printed à la carte, only a single tasting menu that shifts with the market and the season, cooked within sight of the handful of tables that face the counter. Bookings are taken by card imprint and capped at four covers a table, with groups and private hire turned away. Biscotte holds a place in the MICHELIN Guide selection, recognition for cooking that carries the discipline of grander kitchens into a dining room built for sixteen.

01The room and the setting

Behind the plain shopfront, the dining room folds tightly around an open kitchen, so that the clatter of pans and the plating of each course happen within arm's reach of the tables. The restaurant seats just sixteen, a scale the owners have kept deliberately small since opening. Reviewers who return often remark that the tables sit further apart than is usual for a bistro this size, which keeps the room from ever feeling cramped even when full.

It is an unfussy space rather than a designed one — a counter, a run of close tables, large windows onto the kitchen — built for watching two people work rather than for being seen in.

02The chefs

Maximilien Jancourt and Pauline Moreau opened Biscotte in the summer of 2018, after years spent in kitchens that rarely let young cooks near the pass. Between them the pair had worked at Lasserre, the Bristol, Arpège and the George V, with Moreau also trained alongside the pâtissier Pierre Hermé before taking charge of pastry under her own name.

Insider tip

Open Tue–Sat 19:00–22:30; booking by card imprint; closed Sun–Mon.

The division of labour has not changed since the doors opened: Jancourt runs the savoury courses from the open kitchen, while every dessert, down to the ice creams and the choice of cheese, is Moreau's domain — a rare case of a bistro built equally around two disciplines rather than one chef's name.

03The cooking

The format is uncompromising: one menu, no printed carte, with a single branch point at the main course — fish or meat — and again at the end, between a plate of aged cheeses or the dessert of the day. Still or sparkling filtered water is included in the price, and the kitchen will not adapt the menu for gluten, lactose or garlic, though a vegetarian version can be arranged if the restaurant is told at the time of booking.

Behind that simplicity sits a long list of named growers and breeders, printed on the restaurant's own site: ancient-wheat and rye flours from the Ferme de Montaquoy in Seine-et-Marne, AOP Charentes-Poitou butter from the Laiterie de Pamplie, free-range eggs from the Ferme des Parrichets, trout raised at the Pisciculture de la Villette in the Yvelines, organic lamb and chicken reared and slaughtered in France, and fleur de sel carried up from the Guérande marshes of a named paludier, Jérémy Rival.

04What to order

On the menu running for Wednesday 28 October 2026, the three-course dinner (€55) opened with petit épeautre served creamed beneath roasted cauliflower, continued with a choice between fillet of Yvelines trout with green beans, confit fennel and a fish-soup jus, or duckling breast with pan-fried potato gnocchi and carrot in a reduced jus, and finished with a plate of aged cheeses or caramelised quince with beeswax ice cream and walnut shards.

The six-course version (€72) opens the evening with a butternut squash velouté scented with Madagascar vanilla before folding into the same sequence of dishes, giving Moreau's dessert the last word either way.

05The neighbourhood and booking

Biscotte sits a few streets from Porte de Versailles, in a workaday pocket of the 15th arrondissement better known for its exhibition halls than for destination dining, with Convention the nearest métro stop and a Vélib' station close by. It is an address locals keep largely to themselves — one more reason the sixteen covers fill fast.

The restaurant opens Tuesday to Saturday from 7pm to 10.30pm, reservation only, and is closed on Mondays and Sundays. A bank-card imprint secures every booking, tables are capped at four covers, and there is no private hire and no groups — rules that keep the room exactly as intimate as its founders intended.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.