One October day in 2017, James Trees was tromping through the desert near Kyle Canyon with a plug of sourdough starter and a five-gallon bucket of water. He stopped to tug gray-green leaves off sage bushes here, surgically cull paddles of beavertail cactus there. The chef and owner of Esther’s Kitchen was making bread — or, more fundamentally, formulating the genetic blueprint for what would become the restaurant’s signature sourdough.
“I put the plants into the sourdough, added water to it, stirred it up, and then left it out in the desert overnight,” he says.
This bucket of slurry, impregnated with yeast-dusted valley flora, would eventually find its way to the plates of countless diners in the form of Esther’s renowned sourdough, served by the hearty, chewy half loaf with an array of spreads.
“Hopefully no donkeys peed in it while we left the bucket out overnight,” Trees says, laughing. “The next day we came back, strained it, started it, fed it back to our mother dough, and boom — it was alive. It was kicking, it was bubbling.”
Even with any, ahem, bonus additives, Esther’s sourdough embodies a new era in Las Vegas bread. And the Arts District restaurant has plenty of company when it comes to purveying killer carbs. There’s Café Breizh, with its fresh baguettes that completely fly out the door by early afternoon; there’s Monzú Italian Oven + Bar, serving rustic country loaves made with a centuries-old starter. Excellent restaurant bread has never been so widespread in the valley.
It wasn’t always like this. Any longtime Las Vegan who’s done their share of dining out has a few cringey core memories of what used to be the standard bread service in Las Vegas: a basket of chalky white lumps served with frigid pats of foil-wrapped butter.
How did bread get so good in Las Vegas? Baked into this story is the marriage of traditional techniques, new technology, and more than a bit of madness.
Food for thought
To be fair, it’s not like we’re suddenly reveling in some glittering, wholly new breadaissance after decades of tearing into Dark Age peasant loaves. There’s been good bread in the valley, but it was historically a niche proposition. Longtimers might recall André Rochat’s Savoy Bakery back in the ’70s at Flamingo Road and Maryland Parkway, or Albina’s Italian American Bakery on Tropicana and Pecos, or Normandie Country Bakery off Valley View and Desert Inn. (Even Great Buns, still reliably pumping out loaves at an industrial pace on east Trop, enjoyed a certain esteem.) The bread wasn’t necessarily as obsessively artisanal and methodically sourced as what’s on your plate today, but it was produced with pride and attention.
“There’ve been many people who’ve had the skill set to do great bread, but there just hasn’t been the audience,” says Giovanni Mauro, owner and executive chef of Monzú Italian Oven + Bar. “I believe that the audience is finally here. Their palates have become more expansive, and it made room for people who want to do more artisanal stuff.”
Those artisans would take primary inspiration from the Strip — particularly Alain Ducasse’s Mix at Mandalay Bay (2004) and Joël Robuchon at the MGM Grand (2006). The advent of French fine dining in the tourist corridor brought with it in-house baking programs that would inspire a new generation of bread makers.
“Back in the day when Robuchon opened, I was working at Nob Hill at MGM,” Trees recalls. “Every night they would take all the leftover bread from Robuchon and put it in the employee dining room. So, on my way out, I would walk by and take some. That was great bread, but outside of the hotels, you could not find that product.”
What if you could? Trees was chewing on literal food for thought.
Baked on the Strip
It planted a seed of inspiration in Kamel Guechida, too. For eight years, he served as executive pastry chef for Robuchon’s MGM restaurants — where he focused on pastries and desserts, not bread — but when he joined Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining in 2013 as executive corporate pastry chef, he wanted to raise the bread bar.
“After six or seven months at Spago, I looked at the bread and I said, ‘We have to do something better for our customers.’ We started with a classic ciabatta. Wolfgang came and looked and said, ‘Wow, your bread is excellent. Where did you buy it?’ I said, ‘No, we make it all ourselves.’” Puck loved it so much he charged Guechida with creating a scratch-made bread program for all the Puck properties. Now he travels more than 200 days a year, overseeing everything bread in Puck’s culinary empire.
Guechida’s home base is 1228 Main, where we meet on a weekday morning for coffee and an array of carbs — freshly sliced bread smeared with butter; a crème brûlée pastry whose crispy, flared shell cradles the creamy custard; pain au chocolat that delivers a flutter of decadent pleasure; and buttery, gently flaky croissants.
“Look at the layers; that’s perfect lamination,” Guechida says as I tear into the croissant. Lamination is the precision art of properly buttering the folded layers of dough before baking. “You can see how light it is. That’s mastery.”
1228 Main has a kind of secret origin story: It was initially conceived not as a full-blown restaurant, but as a commissary. That is, it was intended as a production center serving 20 valley restaurants with Puck’s breads and pastries. The original idea was for a small café and pastry case up front, a modest walk-in access node for the industriously clamorous, bustling bread operation they’ve got going in the back. The point is that a Strip-born bread mandate is what built the ostensibly local 1228 Main.
Guechida brings to it artistic discipline, focus, and, yes, even a sense of honor to the operation. 1228 Main’s house menu of bread is generally limited to six varieties, to ensure that the team remains focused on quality instead of quantity (while the commissary bakes everything from burger buns for Flanker to a custom blue-cheese brioche for Capital Grille). This might make Guechida sound like something of a tradition-bound stiff, which he most decidedly isn’t. He leavens 1228’s pastry program with a spirit of culinary curiosity and a game understanding that food trends are not only a fact of business, but also an opportunity to give people what they want — on Wolfgang Puck’s terms of quality. For instance, jaded diners have probably long written off the TikTok-fueled craze over Dubai chocolate — those sweet wafers layered with strata of pistachio and knafeh — as gauche and overbearing, but Guechida took on the project of making a dark-chocolate 1228 version that is sweet but stately.
French connections
Chef Pierre Gatel bursts through the kitchen doors bearing a plate of heaven: sliced rounds of baguette topped with pinky-thick slabs of brie. Now, “fresh from the oven” doesn’t have much oomph these days, flogged into inertia by epochs of assaultive marketing. If there’s a primal experience that can give that phrase a factory reset, it’s eating a baguette from Café Breizh. We chomp into these cheese-loaded discs — crazily cratered like sponges, a telltale sign of peak baguette goodness — that simultaneously crunch, smoosh, and ooze, with a festive spray of crumbs as a pleasing coda.
“It’s very pleasant, isn’t it?” Gatel says. “You have that crunchy crust that is giving you a very different texture from the soft interior. … A baguette from the oven is the best thing ever. But every hour that passes, it depreciates in quality. Sometimes people come in and want to buy a baguette, but they say, ‘I’m not going to eat it today.’ Well then, come back in two days. You have to make an appointment with the baguette!”
The 120 baguettes Gatel produces every day are the headliners on a menu that includes everything from rustic loaves to kouign-amann, a rich but refined puff pastry crackling with caramelized sugar.
Formerly the executive pastry chef for Wynn Las Vegas, Gatel got an entrepreneurial itch and opened Café Breizh in 2017. His Strip fine-dining pedigree is also backed with family tradition: His father and his grandfather were both bakers in France; their portraits peer from the walls of Gatel’s Summerlin café, whose default setting is “convivially buzzing.”
The high standards of the hospitality world and familial pride compelled him to pursue a vision of quality with few compromises. When he decided to open Café Breizh, he sourced some of the best ingredients available — such as King Arthur flour from Vermont, praised by pros for its consistency — not to mention a $350,000-plus investment in state-of-the-art kitchen equipment.
Over at Florentine Café & Bakery on Blue Diamond and Rainbow, chef Roman Ritz — who worked under Gatel — performs a balancing act between two traditions. “I would say our motto is ‘the discipline of France and the flavor of Italy.’ I’ve worked in French kitchens, and I’ve seen how strict they are. But then I studied for a month in Napoli. In Italy, they’re very lackadaisical, smoking while mixing with their hands, but the stuff tastes really good. So, imagine if you can make things taste that good, but also with the strong discipline of France. That’s what I go for. It’s like French people making Italian pastries.”
Tech meets tradition
The phrase “artisanal bread” typically conjures sepia-toned scenes of muscular hands massaging dough with tender aggression, but our good bread fortune in Vegas is also the happy product of specialized technology, from temperature-controlled proofing cases to steam-injected deck ovens to finely calibrated industrial mixers. Technology has opened up new levels of efficiency, volume, and scale — allowing Esther’s to pump out 1,500 sourdough loaves a week, for example. But it’s also unlocked higher tiers of quality, too — think Old World values meet Brave New Bread Tech.
At Bar Boheme, Trees’ nouveau French restaurant that opened this summer, the already-buzzed-about baguettes are the product of a dogmatic devotion to quality, a respect for tradition, and pure industrial kitchen might. They’re made with organic T65 flour (a measure of its refinement) from France — conferring on the baguettes an official designation as “Parisian” — and undergo a 16-hour cold ferment. Jake Yergensen, Esther’s corporate executive pastry chef, says he even flew in French pastry experts to train him in the art of what might be called baguette whispering.
“There’s knowledge I had never heard of, like they talk about sounds the dough makes at certain stages when it’s in the mixer. You really have to pay attention.” But the venerable craft also entails the deployment of a $9,800 baguette roller. “The average independent restaurant with a normal kitchen is not capable of producing this artisanal bread,” Yergensen says. “They don’t have the right ovens or setup, or the space needed. We’re pretty unique in having this in-house bread program.”
Yeast mode
I’m having a staring contest with a 300-year-old entity that looks like a bucket of mashed potatoes. Meet the sourdough starter that produces Giovanni Mauro’s entire array of breads, from the chunky country loaves at Monzú to the chewy garlic knots at Old School Pizzeria. “That’s the mother dough,” Mauro says with admiration. “There are elements of a 300-year-old culture in there. We’ve been babying this for 23 years now.”
Mauro developed this starter himself, blending a yeast from the Neapolitan island of Ischia with yeast sourced from apricots at Quail Hollow Farm in Moapa, making a base bread flavor boasting a complex, buttery nuttiness.
“Twenty years ago, I got in my head wondering about how my grandparents and great-grandparents in Sicily made bread,” Mauro explains. “I started with flour, getting ones that aren’t bleached or bromated (an additive ‘improver’). Then I became obsessed with natural starters, and it literally took me five years to get my recipe down. Then I studied what grain looks like, what whole wheat means, the different layers of the bran, and the actual berry.”
It’s another crucial ingredient that explains Vegas’ great carb comeback: a healthy dose of obsession about quality. It paid off for Mauro, whose Monzú is perpetually acclaimed and whose Old School Pizzeria now boasts three locations.
You might say that obsession is happily fermenting into the public at large: At 1228 Main, customers can become bread makers themselves at the restaurant’s popular baking classes that take place twice a month. At Esther’s, Yergensen says hiring bakers used to be a tough sell. Not anymore.
“Now people are really diving in and taking it on as a passion,” he says. “There are just a lot more bread nerds out there now.”
