© Anders Overgaard

When Bartolotta’s scampi arrive in Vegas, they go straight to the dedicated crustacean room in Wynn’s 65,000-square-foot on-site warehouse. Up to ten boxes of live langoustines end up here every week, usually on Thursdays. The boxes are all packed at the exporter’s hidden-in-plain-sight facility (a dockside front, fake signage and all) on his remote island and driven to the airport over mountains and through subsea tunnels in a refrigerated truck. Then they’re flown to the mainland, where Continental Airlines—which, according to the exporter, “does not show enough respect”—takes them across the ocean to an East Coast airport I’m not allowed to name, and ultimately on to Vegas. The whole trip takes as few as 19 hours or as many as 48, due to weather, air traffic and customs delays. The langoustine man knows precisely how to account for these variables but admits only to packing his langoustines “in a mist.”

After all that flying, the langoustines, cooled to temperatures that reduce their metabolic rates without killing them, go through something like a reanimation process, overseen by Wynn’s staff marine biologist Yasmin Tajik. Opening a box reveals 35 uniformly curled Nephrops tails, arranged in five rows of seven. Each animal has its own rectangular domicile; if they’re not separated, they’ll rip one another apart.

After a year of shipments, Bartolotta and Tajik now boast a 90 percent survival rate, due in large part to the ways in which they’ve learned to prime their tanks to mimic the waters around the island, the uniquely stable marine conditions that make the langoustines there the class of their species.

The exporter doesn’t sell to anyone else in America. Worldwide, he has only 12 clients. Where almost every chef can now get almost every ingredient, this is a rare instance of food exclusivity, an advantage whose logistics Bartolotta plans to keep secret. “I had to do all the work,” he says. “I’m not giving out any addresses.” He’s not even dropping any clues. At Wynn, langoustine boxes are disposed of only after all identifying information is razored off. At a 2009 benefit event in Los Angeles, where Bartolotta’s cooks grilled 12 cases of live specimens, the boxes from the island were all unpacked and discarded, covert-mission-style, on the other side of town, so that the other participating chefs—Nobu Matsuhisa and Thomas Keller among them—couldn’t even see a postal code. “I had to protect my source,” says Bartolotta, grabbing a langoustine in each hand and smiling at their safe arrival, their difficult passage, in a way most people never get to smile at their food.

After he drops the two crustaceans into their tank (each yielding a mere ounce of meat, they’ll sell that night for $20 apiece), Bartolotta’s already onto the next thing. This is Vegas. There has to be a next thing. But with Bartolotta it’s never about a flashy new discovery. It’s about going backward, toward the traditional, by procuring more and more of Italy.

“I’m having the hardest time,” he says, “finding these tiny, tiny, tiny Mediterranean shrimp. Three or four fit on a fingernail.”

His scampi begin to wrestle and pinch.

But the shrimp!

“They’re from Sardegna. They’re amazing. Special. Impossible to get.” Bartolotta gets a distant look in his eye. “I’m starting to wonder,” he says, “whether I can find the right guy.”

Langoustines are on the menu at Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare year-round, available alla griglia (grilled), al forno (baked) or al pane (over bread). For reservations, call 702-770-3463.