pandas 0.21 introduces new functions for Parquet:
import pandas as pd
pd.read_parquet('example_pa.parquet', engine="pyarrow")
or
import pandas as pd
pd.read_parquet('example_fp.parquet', engine="fastparquet")
The above link explains:
These engines are very similar and should read/write nearly identical parquet format files. These libraries differ by having different underlying dependencies (fastparquet by using numba, while pyarrow uses a c-library).