What are the opening hours?

Tuesday 11:30am - 3pm 5pm - 9pm Wednesday 11:30am - 3pm 5pm - 9pm Thursday 11:30am - 3pm 5pm - 9pm Friday 11:30am - 3pm 5pm - 9pm Saturday 11am - 3pm 5pm - 9pm Sunday 11am - 3pm

La Panetteria

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La Panetteria is a cozy old fashion Italian Restaurants in Bethesda, Maryland La Panetteria is a cozy old fashion Italian restaurant.
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It has been around for 30+ years. It feels and tastes like Italy. In fact according to one of our customers it is "a corner of Italy in Bethesda"

10/13/2026

The new menu is here. 🇦🇷🇮🇹

Last week we showed you the new walls and promised the kitchen was next. Chef Ettore has been testing and tasting for weeks, and today the new La Panetteria menu is officially on the tables.

You'll notice it leans Argentine. That's deliberate. The grill takes center stage: a Parrillada for two with short ribs, sausage, morcilla, mollejas and flank steak, served with chimichurri and salsa criolla. Bife de chorizo. A 14oz Argentine ribeye. The milanesa three ways, including a caballo with a fried egg on top. To start, provoleta, choripán, crispy mollejas, Revuelto Gramajo, and seven kinds of baked empanadas. For dessert, panqueque and flan, both with dulce de leche.

The Italian side is still here, and still the reason a lot of you first walked in: Risotto Ettore, homemade burrata, fresh pasta, the seafood zuppetta. Plus a new name on the pasta list, the Rigatoni "Frank Sinatra." If you saw our Sinatra birthday video, you know why.

Thirty-five years on Cordell Avenue, and the menu finally says out loud what the kitchen has always been: Italian roots, Argentine heart.

So, regulars: what's the first thing you're ordering? 👇

One note: we're closed this Wednesday, Oct 14, for a private event. Open Thursday again, with Pasta Night as usual.

📞 (301) 951-6433 · ✉️ [email protected]

10/10/2026

Earlier this week we told you the walls were step one and the kitchen was step two. Step two is on the table. 🔥🇦🇷

Three new plates join the menu, all straight from Argentina:

Parrillada para 2. This is the heart of any Argentine Sunday, now on Cordell Avenue. Chorizo, morcilla and cuts off the grill, with charred red onion, brought to the table still sizzling on cast iron. It's built for two people and a long conversation.

House Provoleta. Every asado in Argentina starts with this. Provolone is melted until it bubbles, then finished with oregano, olive oil and roasted cherry tomatoes. Ask for bread and don't share it unless you have to.

Revuelto Gramajo. A Buenos Aires bistro classic: soft scrambled eggs, ham and crispy shoestring potatoes in one skillet. If you grew up in Argentina, it tastes like home. If you didn't, it's about to become a favorite.

Same white tablecloths. Same homemade pasta. Same Chef Ettore. The Argentine side of the menu just got bigger.

We have tables tonight. Which one are you ordering first? 👇

📞 (301) 951-6433 · ✉️ [email protected]

10/09/2026

Earlier this week we showed you the new walls. Today, a hint about what's next. 🍷

There's a reason Mendoza got a spot in our dining room. It's the land of Malbec and slow, long Argentine lunches, the kind where nobody checks the time. That's always been the spirit of this place.

Now Chef Ettore is bringing some of that into the kitchen. He's been working on new additions to the menu. We're not revealing anything until it's ready, but it's coming soon ;)

So we want to hear from you: if you could ask Ettore to add ONE dish to the menu, what would it be? 👇 We'll read every answer (and pass the best ones to the kitchen).

Tonight: 15% off the Argentinian Corner. 📞 (301) 951-6433

10/06/2026

If you've been in lately, you may have noticed. If you haven't, here's your reason. 🇦🇷🇮🇹

We gave our dining room a refresh. Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Iguazú now hang above the tables. The Argentina #10 and River Plate jerseys have their own spot on the wall. The ARGENTINA scarf from the 2018 World Cup is over the bar arch, right where it belongs.

Why now? Because after 35 years on Cordell Avenue, we wanted the room to tell the same story the menu has always told. Italian roots, Argentine heart, and a neighborhood that's been coming back for decades.

The white tablecloths stayed. So did Chef Ettore, the homemade pasta, and the milanesa. Some things don't get redecorated.

Here's the part we're excited about: this is round one. There's more coming to the room in the next few weeks, and something is happening in the kitchen too. We'll tell you when it's ready. 😉

So, a question for the regulars: which wall are you sitting by next time? Buenos Aires, Mendoza or Iguazú? 👇

📞 (301) 951-6433 · ✉️ [email protected]

10/02/2026

More from last Friday's birthday surprise, because one video wasn't enough. 🎤🎂

Thank you to Tim Beasley of The Martini Men for bringing Ol' Blue Eyes to Cordell Avenue, and to our birthday table for letting us share the night.

Were you in the room? Tag yourself, and tag whoever you'd bring to your own celebration. 👇

Weekend reservations: (301) 951-6433

09/30/2026

Friday night at La Panetteria, a birthday dinner turned into a show. 🎤

One of our guests was celebrating, and her family had a surprise planned: Frank Sinatra himself. Or the closest thing Bethesda has seen in a while. He came in with the suit, the voice, and the attitude, walked right up to the birthday table, and sang.

What happened next is the part nobody planned. The whole room turned around. Tables that didn't know each other started singing along. People put down their forks, which in a restaurant is the highest compliment. By the second song it wasn't one table's party anymore. It was everybody's Friday.

That's what 35 years on Cordell Avenue has taught us. People come for the bread, the pasta, the milanesa. They come back because of nights like this.

Thanks to our guest for letting us share this day with you.

Got a celebration coming up, like a birthday, anniversary, retirement, or the company's end-of-year dinner? Our atrium room is built for exactly this. Bring the family, bring the team, bring the show.

🎶 Who would YOU want to walk in and sing at your birthday? Tell us below. 👇

📞 (301) 951-6433 · ✉️ [email protected]

09/28/2026

📣 NOW HIRING — IMMEDIATE OPENINGS!

La Panetteria, a family-owned Italian-Argentinian restaurant in Bethesda, is hiring:

👨‍🍳 Experienced Cook — Minimum 3 years of experience
🥗 Pantry Cook
🍽️ Dishwasher
🤵 Servers — Fine-dining experience and English required

We are looking for reliable, professional, and hardworking individuals to join our restaurant family.

Please send your résumé to [email protected] or contact Hector directly at 202-538-1011.

📍 La Panetteria — Bethesda, Maryland
Positions available immediately!

⸻

📣 ¡ESTAMOS CONTRATANDO — VACANTES INMEDIATAS!

La Panetteria, un restaurante familiar italiano-argentino en Bethesda, está buscando:

👨‍🍳 Cocinero con experiencia — Mínimo 3 años de experiencia
🥗 Cocinero de pantry / estación fría
🍽️ Lavaplatos
🤵 Meseros(as) — Se requiere experiencia en restaurantes de alta categoría y dominio del inglés

Buscamos personas responsables, profesionales y trabajadoras para formar parte de nuestra familia.

Envíe su currículum a [email protected] o comuníquese directamente con Hector al 202-538-1011.

📍 La Panetteria — Bethesda, Maryland
¡Vacantes disponibles inmediatamente!

09/24/2026

Thirty-five years on Cordell Avenue.

That number is easy to print and hard to actually do. In thirty-five years, Bethesda turned over almost completely. Buildings went up. Whole blocks changed character. Restaurants opened with more money and more press than we ever had, ran for three years, and closed. The street itself got rebuilt around us more than once.

We stayed. Same kitchen, same corner, same way of doing it.

What kept the doors open wasn't a concept. It was a decision Chef Ettore made a long time ago and never revisited: make the bread, make the pasta, buy the good mozzarella, don't cut the sauce short, and don't rush anybody out of their chair. It's not a strategy. It's just the job, done the same way every night for three and a half decades.

The part we didn't expect is what it does to a neighborhood over time. People who had a first date here bring their spouse back for an anniversary. Kids who ordered off this menu with their parents now sit at the same tables with their own kids.

We've hosted graduations, engagements, retirements, and more than a few nights that were just a Tuesday and needed to be better.

That's what we actually built. Not a restaurant, a place people come back to.

So: thank you. To the regulars who've been coming since the nineties, and to everyone who walked in for the first time last month. You're both why this works.

What's your La Panetteria memory? We'd love to read them. 👇

Book a table this weekend: (301) 951-6433.

09/22/2026

🍂 Fall started today. In a restaurant, that's not a decoration thing; it's a cooking thing.

Certain dishes only really land when it gets cold. Risotto Ettore is the obvious one: saffron, stirred slowly, finished at the last second so it's still loose when it reaches the table. In August it reads as too much. In October it reads as exactly right. The long-simmered sauces come back into rotation. Braises make sense again. The wines people ask for change without anyone announcing it.

Chef Ettore didn't rewrite the menu for the season, and that's on purpose. The menu at La Panetteria already carries both traditions — northern and southern Italian on one side, the Argentine classics on the other — and both have a cold-weather register. The milanesa is a fall dish. So is a plate of homemade pasta with something that took four hours.

What actually shifts in the fall is how people eat here. Dinners run longer. Tables don't clear as fast. The atrium room fills up and stays full, because nobody's in a rush to walk back out into a July evening. Argentines have a word for that stretch of the night after the plates are gone and nobody has stood up yet: la sobremesa. It's our favorite part of service.

Cordell Avenue in the fall. Book a table: (301) 951-6433.

09/18/2026

Why does an Italian restaurant in Bethesda serve milanesas?

Because the story doesn't end in Italy.

A hundred years ago, whole villages boarded ships from Italy to Buenos Aires. They carried their mothers' recipes with them, and in Argentina those recipes grew up in a new house. The Milanese cotoletta became the milanesa, and then somebody laid ham, tomato and melted cheese over it and called it napolitana, which is the most Argentine thing about the whole dish.

Sunday lunch became the sobremesa: the hour or two after the plates are cleared, when nobody stands up, the coffee arrives, and the conversation turns out to have been the meal.

Chef Ettore cooks both halves of that story on one menu, on the same corner of Cordell Avenue he has worked for 35 years. Northern Italy, southern Italy, and the Argentine table, not a concept, just a family that emigrated and came home with new recipes.

Starting tonight, Fridays belong to that side of the house.

🥩 VIERNES ARGENTINO — 15% off the Argentinian Corner, every Friday
🍝 PASTA THURSDAY — 15% off all pastas, every Thursday

(Dine-in only. Excludes alcohol. No coupon needed.)

Bring people. Order too much. Stay for the sobremesa — nobody here is going to rush you out.

Weekend tables go quickly, so call ahead: (301) 951-6433 / Lapanetteria.com

Address

4921 Cordell Avenue
Bethesda, MD
20814

Opening Hours

Tuesday	11:30am - 3pm
	5pm - 9pm
Wednesday	11:30am - 3pm
	5pm - 9pm
Thursday	11:30am - 3pm
	5pm - 9pm
Friday	11:30am - 3pm
	5pm - 9pm
Saturday	11am - 3pm
	5pm - 9pm
Sunday	11am - 3pm

Website

https://lapanetteria.com/

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