Moutarlier les artisans du goût - Lutry

Pastry, chocolate, and a tea room behind the counter

The case at Lutry runs pâtisserie one way and chocolate the other, with a salon de thé attached for anyone who would rather sit than carry. The house is a Swiss family pâtisserie-chocolaterie founded in December 1985 at Chexbres, and Lutry was the second address, opened in 1990 in the old village on the Léman arc. In May 2017 the shop moved a few metres from its first Lutry site, enlarged and modernised, and gained a fuller tea room, which is the version standing today. Production sits elsewhere: since May 2019 the group has centralised its pâtisserie laboratory, traiteur work and cacaofacture at Noville, so Lutry draws on the same base as the Lausanne, Chexbres and Montreux shops.

A boutique stop with somewhere to sit

The visit is counter-led. Browse the case, choose from the day’s pastries, chocolates, croissants, biscuits, sandwiches or apéritif items, then take them away or settle into the salon de thé. The tea room is small and village-paced, so it suits a slow half hour rather than a working morning. The drinks follow traditional tea-room logic rather than a specialty coffee programme: coffee, tea or hot chocolate to go with something sweet, with no pretence of named origins or brew methods. What the house is serious about is chocolate. The Cacao Facture line has worked bean to bar since 2019, with cocoa sourced, selected and turned into tablets and confections in-house, which is a rarer commitment than a chocolate counter usually implies.

What to order

Start with a pastry from the case and a hot chocolate, since that pairing shows both halves of the house at once. The technique is classic French and Swiss, so the seasonal creations are the ones to read first; they change through the year and carry more of the kitchen’s thinking than the standing lines do. Chocolate is the thing to take home, particularly the bean-to-bar tablets, with the fruit pastes and nut confections alongside them for anyone building a box. For a savoury pause, the croissants, sandwiches and apéritif items cover a light stop without turning the visit into a meal. The quality marker worth knowing is Relais Desserts, the international circle of artisan pâtissiers, which the house joined in 2001 and where a second family member was admitted in 2013.