Destination Dessert: the Bakery Behind the World’s Only ‘cookie Shot’ Vending Machine

When Dominique Ansel introduced the Cronut to the world in May 2013, he couldn’t have predicted his creation would spark one of the biggest food crazes of the decade. Ansel, a French pastry chef living in New York, didn’t know then that the flaky pastry would launch him to celebrity status and lead to nonstop lines outside his SoHo bakery. Now, the word “Cronut” is as much a staple of the breakfast pastry scene as options like scones, muffins, or bagels.

Ansel has continued to expand his culinary creations. In fact, he’s introduced not just one Cronut to the world, but more than 800. While you can buy his products in a few locations around New York City, there’s only one Dominique Ansel bakery in the world outside of NYC: Dominique Ansel Las Vegas, just steps from Nobu Hotel Las Vegas within Caesar’s Palace. And while there’s nothing like visiting the original, the Las Vegas location has quite a few destination-worthy desserts — including the world’s first robotic “cookie shot” machine, co-created by Ansel himself.

 

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Here’s why anyone with a sweet tooth should head to Dominique Ansel Las Vegas.

On the birth of the Cronut

For Ansel, creating the Cronut was less about having a specific goal in mind and more about trying to create something new. “It’s about doing something that is, yes, creative, but also takes people to some place, like old childhood memories,” he told Matador Network recently in Las Vegas, “or something that speaks to people.” As a child, Ansel says he loved donuts. But because he grew up in France, “I grew up eating croissants.”  “Everyone knows a donut. Everyone knows the croissant,” he says. “Putting them together was like the best of each culture.”

The result of Ansel’s attempt was a fried dough pastry filled with cream and rolled in sugar. While it looks vaguely like a donut, the taste is more akin to a flaky, less overtly sweet croissant. The original Cronut debuted in NYC in May 2013 and immediately led to lines outside the door nearly every day. It was arguably the first dessert to “go viral,” arguably overshadowing the Instagram cupcake craze of the mid-2000s. At the peak of the Cronut craze, scalpers were reselling the sweet pastries for up to $100 each.

Ansel sat back and relaxed at that point — for exactly one month. Then, 30 days after the first Cronut came out, he pulled it off the menu, replacing it with an entirely new Cronut flavor. Gone was the world-changing rose vanilla with Tahitian vanilla ganache Cronut, and in was the lemon maple variation. That was soon replaced by a blackberry Cronut with lime-zest sugar and blackberry-swirled vanilla cream filling. “We’ve never repeated a flavor,” says Ansel. He estimates he’s created more than 800 or 900 flavors in total, 12 of which make the menu each year. “We have a Cronut bible,” he says, of how they keep track of all the options.

Each month’s Cronut is entirely up to Ansel’s creativity, though he says they’ll sometimes time flavors with seasons, including caramel nuts on winter offerings or fresh fruits on summer Cronuts. He thinks the rose vanilla Cronut was likely the most memorable for people as it was the first, but says that in general, people’s favorites tend to be the most recent ones. “It’s always time for a new Cronut,” he laughs.

Ansel estimates that each new Cronut variation usually comes to fruition in just a few tests, but that new pastries can take up to six months and go through dozens of iterations. “Sometimes the idea is like very challenging and technically difficult to realize,” he says. “It’s never like, ‘we tried making one, and it’s good enough.’”

It’s been 12 years since the Cronut graced the world’s pastry scene, but for dedicated fans, it was and continues to be a reason to travel to SoHo or the Vegas Strip every month. Since then, it’s been copied many times in something Ansel describes as a “fine line between inspiring people and ripping off ideas.” Fortunately, knew enough about intellectual property laws to trademark the name “Cronut” before it hit the bakery racks. Freshly baked Cronuts are available only at official Dominique Ansel locations, each of which has dedicated fans who have had tried every single variation since its debut. “Some people have traveled all over the world. Some, I know them,” he says. “We’re a destination.”

At Dominique Ansel Las Vegas, bakery classics go high-tech

If there’s one sweet treat that will forever be popular around the world (other than the Cronut, perhaps), it’s an old-fashioned chocolate chip cookie. And while Dominique Ansel Las Vegas offers plenty of classic cookies, ranging from macarons to cannelé de Bordeaux to a tried-and-true chocolate chunk, they’re certainly not all old-fashioned.

One cookie of particular popularity is Ansel’s famous “cookie shot”: a warm chocolate chip cookie formed into the shape of a small glass, filled with cold Madagascan vanilla milk. He debuted it in 2014 at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, but soon ran into a problem. Buyers wanted cookie shots at all hours of the day, yet his SoHo bakery closed at 7 PM. Fortunately, he overcame that problem just in time to open Dominique Ansel Las Vegas — now home to the world’s only cookie shot vending machine.

 

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The 11-foot-tall machine is shaped like a bottle of milk and equipped with a high-tech robotic arm, viewed through a huge glass window. Lining the inside of the machine are the cookie shot glasses, baked fresh daily. When a buyer orders a shot, the arm gently selects a cookie, fills it with milk from a climate-controlled dispenser, and slides it through a flap for the buyer to grab. The idea came from Ansel himself, who said he wanted a way for fans to buy cookie shots 24/7, but also wanted it to be fun and interactive. “I went to an engineer first who told me it was impossible,” he says. “We said, ‘no, that can’t be right.’ Eventually, it took over a year, but we did it.”

Each cookie shot costs $8.99 and is ordered via QR code on the buyer’s phone, then immediately delivered by the robotic arm. The process is quick, with the machine able to serve up to 75 cookie shots every hour. It’s almost impossible to walk by the machine and not see a crowd of people standing nearby, waiting to watch the high-tech cookie machine in action.

If you want a sweet treat served by the high-tech bakery assistant, you’ll need to head to Las Vegas. The custom machine was a one-off partnership between Ansel and Illinois-based RoboChef, with no plans to build more. In fact, Ansel doesn’t even plan to open any more bakeries. “Open too many locations,” he says, “and you lose the soul of your food.”