A 1st look inside Cronut creator’s new Las Vegas bakery
For Dominique Ansel, creator of the Cronut, the famed pastry is partly a matter of good record keeping. That’s because each of his bakeries offers distinct Cronut flavors. When a new flavor is introduced at a shop, it’s for that shop only. Matcha strawberry at one bakery doesn’t overlap with another.
Since the croissant-doughnut hybrid debuted nearly a decade ago, about 600 flavors have been introduced. Hence the need to keep track.
“We want to keep it new, we want to keep it fresh, but the more we go, the harder it gets,” the chef said the other morning over coffee at Dominique Ansel Las Vegas, his first bakery in town, opening Friday in Caesars Palace.
The inaugural Cronut for Vegas (changes monthly) already has been announced: Lucky Cherry Chambord & Caramelia, which is stuffed with cherry Chambord jam and Valrhona caramelized milk chocolate ganache.
The bakery occupies a curving space scooped from the casino floor next door to Gordon Ramsay Pub. Globe fixtures bloom with inviting white light. Walls and coffee cups, hat boxes and domed takeout containers and confection-filled cylinders glow in subtly different shades of Ansel orange. The effect is a bit like the inside of a suntan — laden with pastries.
‘I come here humbly’
About six or seven years ago, Ansel said, he began discussions with Caesars about a Vegas spot. Initially, “it was not good timing. I had so many things going on.” And when the timing was right, a long process still lay ahead, like designing the bakery, developing the menu and creating an experience worthy of Vegas.
“I come here very humbly. I don’t take anything for granted,” said Ansel, a James Beard Award winner who also has been named the world’s best pastry chef. “Vegas is an amazingly great place for food, with amazing (kitchen) talent. It’s going to be a learning experience for us. I take it one step at a time. Not too much, too fast.”
On the menu
Inaugural offerings reflect this careful approach. Besides drinks, the menu board only lists about two dozen items.
There are Cronuts, of course, and Dominique Kouign Amann (his version of the flaky Breton pastry). There are cookies in several flavors and specialties like mini madeleines baked and piped to order. Croissants run to sweet and savory, while sandwiches (steamed egg, croque monsieur) and a quiche (spinach Gruyère) keep to the savory side.
The highly anticipated Lucky 7, a collection of confections created especially for Vegas, were set out in ranks in the pastry case the other morning. Fortune cookies and four-leaf clovers drew the eye, their glossy, perfectly formed shapes putting one in mind of lacquerwork and high-end cosmetics and objets de vertu.
“Balancing colors, shapes and flavors — these are very important to me,” the chef said.
The beauty of the Lucky 7s will be destroyed on first bite, of course, the pleasure of the look, of surfaces, giving way to the pleasure of the palate. But such is the fate of all pastry that celebrates the blurring of craft and aesthetics, baking and art.
Impatient for pastries
Dominique Ansel has a wide smile and an easygoing manner and a beard brushed with gray. He is also whippet-lean, as lean as a javelin or a long-distance runner, this man who has dedicated his professional life to butter and sugar and elegant indulgence. Not fair! But God does indeed have a playful side; it would have been too easy to make Dominique Ansel fat.
About 30 people will staff the pastry operation, which is divided between the production kitchen downstairs and the glass-walled finishing room upstairs.
The other morning, an attractive couple — she Titian-haired, he square-jawed and stubbled — were shot for bakery marketing materials enjoying pastries and coffee. Some casino visitors, mistaking them for actual customers, tried to enter the (roped-off) bakery. Another woman, upon learning the bakery wouldn’t open until Friday, nonetheless attempted to negotiate an advance tasting box.
But who could blame her? When it comes to Dominique Ansel, resistance is futile.
Contact Johnathan L. Wright at jwright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ItsJLW on Twitter.
