There are a lot of good things to eat in Las Vegas. Somehow I can never remember any of them. I’ve visited semi-regularly over the years—like a penny tumbling toward the bottom of a sofa, every American finds themself in Las Vegas a certain number of times in their life—and I know that I have managed to feed myself and even to write about doing so. Still, when people ask me for Vegas recommendations, I draw a blank—all the shiny casino restaurants imported from New York and California blurring into one long perfectly fine meal I wish I had enjoyed somewhere else. There is one exception: I tell them to go to the Bellagio Hotel and Casino and eat an almond croissant.
I first tasted this almond croissant in 1998, not long after the Bellagio opened. This was a big moment for Las Vegas. For the previous decade the city had been distancing itself from the adult pleasures on which it had been founded, marketing itself instead as a family destination, with casinos shaped like cartoon castles, Egyptian pyramids, and bizarro New York skylines topped by rollercoasters—more Mickey Mouse than Rat Pack.
The Bellagio, opened by casino magnate Steve Wynn, was designed to change all that. In addition to adopting the appearance of a Lake Como palazzo, it featured an art museum, the soon-to-be-iconic acrobatic fountains, and, most strikingly, 17 restaurants—many of them high-end names imported from New York and San Francisco. These days, when every restaurant group in the country seems to have a Vegas outpost, this seems completely natural. But at the time, when the idea of dining on the Strip still brought to mind massive buffets and signs touting $3.99 PRIME RIB!!!, it seemed improbable, if not faintly ridiculous.
A magazine editor friend of mine had been invited to check out the new dining options, so I, along with another friend, tagged along. We slept three to a room and dined opulently at Le Cirque, Osteria Circo, Jean Georges Vongerichten’s Prime Steakhouse, and several other spots. I remember the meals fondly but dimly. Mostly, I remember blearily stumbling into the lobby’s coffee shop after a late night spent at the blackjack table, reimbursing the house for our comped meals, with interest. That’s where I found the almond croissant.
It was my Platonic ideal: moistened with a drizzle of rum syrup but still buttery and crackling, filled with a layer of almond cream that lightly oozed out into the pastry’s delightfully chewy burnt edges, and topped with a snowfall of powdered sugar and a plate-armor coating of toasted almonds. Of all the absurdities of the weekend, which included seeing a van Gogh within hearing distance of slot machines, this seemed the most preposterous: Why was this seemingly throwaway pastry so good? What genius of viennoiserie lurked behind the scenes? Who cared this much?
Since then I’ve made a point to stop by whenever I was in town and have sent many friends to taste this croissant—always with the caveat that I might be delusional or that it may have gone downhill. Despite nearly 25 years and a change in ownership (to MGM Resorts International) the latter does not seem to have come true. It has morphed into a circle and is now branded as an “almond Danish,” but it has retained its croissant-ish character and is as delicious as ever.
If there are two reasons I went into journalism, they are to eat croissants and go behind the scenes of a casino. So, on a recent visit to Vegas, I decided to finally attempt to figure out why this croissant is so unfailingly good.
The Bellagio’s Executive Pastry Chef Philippe Angibeau met me near the Bellagio Buffet. Angineau, 44, is from the far southeast corner of France, just outside Monaco, trim, and very French. We ducked through a set of inconspicuous doors and into the vast shadow casino that exists behind and beneath the sparkly one the public sees. Yellow motorized carts zipped down long hallways running in each direction. We passed stacks of moribund slot machines waiting for repair; employee cafeterias and lounges; and offices for Uniform Control, Accounting, and Horticulture. A poster advised:
APPEAR APPROACHABLE
MAKE EYE CONTACT
GREET THE GUEST BEFORE THEY GREET YOU
One set of doors back onto the casino floor featured full-length portraits of a smiling porter holding a mop and a restaurant server placing a bowl of strawberries on a table, along with the somewhat cryptic legend, “This Is the Life We Inspire.”
Angibeau led us briskly through the maze. He has been running the Bellagio’s pastry department for three-and-a-half years, but was present at the hotel’s opening, working under Jean Philippe Maury, the original pastry chef and a winner of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France, the venerable award for craftsmanship. After stints elsewhere on the Strip, Angibeau now oversees all baking that takes place in the building, including the coffee shops, room service, banquets, and the Bellagio’s current crop of fourteen restaurants, which include Le Cirque, Prime, Spago, the Mayfair Supper Club, and Picasso. Pastry is a 24-hour operation, with some 60 employees, the largest department in the hotel’s food and beverage program.
The very small piece of this empire that I had come to see waited in the bread room, a space the size of many entire kitchens in New York City. One wall housed walk-in proofers and the other a bank of floor-to-ceiling ovens. We met assistant pastry chef Emmanuel Pousse, another Frenchman, who promised to reveal the alchemic secrets of the almond croissant production process.
Traditionally, croissants aux amandes were a way for pastry chefs to redeem and reuse leftover croissants, which emerged as a staple of French patisseries in the late 19th century. Bakers would take a day’s unsold croissants, cut them in half, fill them with almond cream, and revivify their hardening texture with rum syrup. The Bellagio version has always been made from scratch.
I watched eagerly as Pousse rolled out a slab of dough that had been double-folded two times to incorporate ample quantities of Isigny Sainte-Mère pastry butter, an especially luscious product from Normandy. He spread the resulting canvas with a layer of custard made of almond paste, eggs, sugar, and more butter, then rolled the whole thing up into a tight log from which he cut rounds the size and appearance of bake-at-home cinnamon rolls. From there, things came together quickly: a topping of almonds and syrup, a quick hour-and-a-half proof, fifteen minutes in a 350-degree oven, et voila.
Angibeau shrugged. It was a gesture I knew well from time spent in other kitchens; what’s miraculous to us as civilians and diners is so often just another piece of everyday labor to chefs. While the croissants baked, we took a tour of the rest of Angibeau’s domain. In the refrigerated chocolate room, a chef scraped up thin layers of chocolate to be used as topping for tiramisu. Angibeau proudly showed off a machine the size of a Mini Cooper called the ChefCut WaterJet Cake Chocolate Cutting Machine, which uses a computer and laser-guided jets to produce whatever elaborate edible shapes one could imagine. In the main kitchen, other chefs worked on showcase desserts for the restaurants: One was fashioning chocolate and hazelnut praline cigars to be served in a crystal ashtray covered by a hickory-smoke-filled cloche, a specialty of Mayfair Supper Club. Another delicately dipped coconut cheesecake donuts into a mango and pineapple glaze, to be served at the restaurant Picasso.
It occurred to me what a scruffy underdog my humble almond pastry was in such company. Even among the Bellagio’s viennoiseries, it was the poor little brother: Angibeau’s team makes about 150 a day, as opposed to five to six hundred pains au chocolat and six to seven hundred plain croissants.
And, of course, the dining revolution the Bellagio started has transformed Las Vegas, which is now known as much for Carbone as it is for its buffets. There is no shortage of attention-grabbing pastry on the Strip, from a dark chocolate fedora at the Encore’s Sinatra to a giant fortune cookie at Tao Asian Bistro at the Venetian. Seven casinos have literally been imploded in Vegas since my first encounter with the Bellagio’s almond croissant. Sixteen have opened and at least the same number have changed names. Countless chefs have come and gone; residencies have started and ended; a billion light bulbs have burned out and been replaced. Let’s not even get into how I have changed in all this time.
Through it all my little pastry has soldiered on, neither high roller nor whale, just a regular guy trying to keep its head above water on the Strip. And, as I confirmed when I finally got my teeth into one again, fresh from the oven, the best damned thing to eat in town.