I had never tasted a Cronut.
I left my New York City-centric life in 2012, just before Dominique Ansel introduced the hybrid pastry — a combination croissant and doughnut — that would go viral and change the way we eat (with our phones first).
Getting one’s hands on this inescapable, Internet-fueled sensation required lining up at dawn outside Ansel’s SoHo bakery, sometimes with hundreds of others clamoring for the same limited stock of flaky, jam- or cream-filled wonders. Even though I visited the city a few times a year, I couldn’t justify spending hours waiting for a doughnut. It was one of those “only in New York” things to which I no longer had access.
But this year, I finally bit into my first Cronut on the casino floor of Caesars Palace. Ansel opened this Las Vegas outpost of his bakery in 2022, and has another opening at Paris Las Vegas this fall.
That Cronut, with raspberry jam sweetening crackling shards of pastry, was everything I’d imagined. It lived up to the hype, even if the hype was almost a dozen years stale.
While the Twin Cities’ food scene is certainly world-class, we’re often late to get national franchises or cult international bakeries, and we’re almost entirely overlooked when celebrity chefs seek to expand their footprints. And it works both ways: The biggest players in local restaurants typically operate here and here alone, keeping our food world a near-secret from everyone except those who make the effort to visit.
You’ll find the opposite in Las Vegas, where a chef practically has to have their own Food Network show to land a restaurant on the Strip.
Sure, some outstanding local chefs are finding their own way in burgeoning neighborhoods like the Arts District; a luxurious Italian brunch at chef James Trees’ restaurant Esther’s Kitchen was the best meal of my trip. But most Vegas visitors won’t make it there. Not when Michelin-bedecked chefs from around the globe are bringing some of the hottest (and in some cases hard-to-get) dishes to one neon-lit thoroughfare, where access to some of the world’s buzziest foods is just a flight away.