Trailblazer pastry chef has earned her hash marks

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, June 21, 2000 | 7:41 a.m.

Brenda Hichins is Executive Pastry Chef at the Rio hotel-casino, a position she has held since 1992. What's significant about this is that she was the first woman in this city to hold such a position at a major hotel. That makes her a real trailblazer.

Hitchins is a former college athlete and a woman of stature, just under 6 feet tall and broad-shouldered, with short blonde hair and a shy, winning smile. She also happens to make the best bagels in the city -- crusty, chewy bagels made from scratch, with just a touch of honey in the dough. "Honey gives the dough a better texture than anything else I've experimented with," she says.

She's a brilliant bread and pastry maker who manages a staff of just over 50. Her products feed almost 20,000 people a day. These numbers, by the way, are up around 1,000 percent from when she took the job. When she arrived at the Rio, most of the pastries the hotel served were boxed, commercial products.

Hitchins has a spacious office inside the main bakery of the hotel. Since she's the mother of a 7-year old named Alex, the first thing you're likely to notice in here is a little pewter soccer trophy depicting a shoe and a ball that says "Thanks, Coach," displayed proudly on her desk. Pictures of her son are above the door.

Like so many successful people, Hitchins came to her profession because of a lucky accident. She's a native of Las Vegas, but she spent her formative years in Reno, where she won a basketball scholarship to UNR. After a year in Laramie, Wyo., where she trained with a coach who impressed her, she returned to Reno to complete her degree. That's also when she discovered that she needed a job.

Then fate intervened. She got a job at a German bakery called International Market, where she was mentored by a gruff German named Klaus Kinchel. Kinchel gave her menial duties before eventually teaching her all about German rye bread, Kaiser rolls and similar baked goods. At that point she had to make a choice -- athletics or baking. Luckily for us, she chose the latter.

From there she had a steady climb to her current position, although not always an easy one. Continuing her career in Reno, she moved to John Ascuaga's Nugget where she worked her way up to the position of Assistant Bakery Manager by 1987. "The Nugget was fun, but the pastries there were all-American -- cakes, pies, that kind of thing, and I realized that I needed to learn more."

Hitchins doesn't admit it directly, but because the world of bread and pastry has traditionally been a man's world, she has encountered a fair bit of institutional sexism. "I think it helped me out that I used to bench press 200 pounds" she says. "And because I was an athlete, I could work those 14- and 15-hour days, just like the men."

Nonetheless, she is reluctant to say that there is a gender gap. Seeing Hitchins, who is to this day a vigorous and athletic 40-year-old, one gets the impression that she would have been successful at any endeavor she decided upon. "My philosophy is that if you want something in life, you can get it." But then she adds, "that doesn't mean that there is always equal pay for women, although I'm very happy with how I've been treated at the Rio."

After her stint in Reno as a baker she returned to Las Vegas, where she won a job as a baker at Caesars Palace, working with a skillful Austrian named Manfred Schmidhuber. Then in 1988 she got a position at the Desert Inn, where she worked as Assistant Pastry Chef under Michael Ty. "At the DI, I learned a lot," she says. "I took classes, and learned about management. It was a great step." That eventually led to her present position.

Hitchins displays all the breads made here: ciabatta, olive bread, sourdough baguette, country white, focaccia -- in all, around 25 varieties, all picture perfect. Then she proudly shows off her one $100,000 steam-injected deck oven, where most of the breads are baked.

In the pastry rooms there are tiramisus, cheesecakes, creme brulees and other fancy desserts, all overseen by Hitchins and prepared by her staff. "We make desserts for 18 venues in the hotel, including the buffets, room service and banquets, all of the restaurants ... except for Napa and Fiore (two fine dining restaurants in the hotel.) They have their own pastry chefs."

Then she talks numbers. "Tonight we are doing a banquet for just under 1,000, all the breads and desserts. We make 1,000 cream puffs a day, and more than 5,000 pastries, including whole cakes and pies. We also make our own ice creams, rich ones with 18 percent butterfat."

Perhaps the easiest way to sample Hitchins' good breads and pastries is to go to the hotel's Star Deli, which is, by chance, directly in front of the main bakery area. Here you'll find those delicious bagels and much more, all terrific stuff.

There are, for instance, fruit tarts replete with blueberries, raspberries, apples and orange slices, and seven-layer Hungarian-style tortes with a thick chocolate glaze on the top layer.

There are Opera cakes, dreamy, creamy individual tiramisus, carrot cakes, and every manner of breakfast rolls, croissants, pecan rolls, muffins. In the bottom of the case are black and white moon-shaped cookies that look as if they were painted by a French impressionist. There are also the breads, all of which are, incredibly, under $3 a loaf.

Hitchins performs more duties yet. She travels to learn more about her craft and does chocolate sculpture, having been mentored by a chocolate guru named Ewald Notter. Exercising her creative side, she showed off an eccentric handroll made from crunchy toile pastry laced with black and white sesame seeds and filled with a coconut rice mousse, which she was about to present at a special hotel function.

She is also, in her own words, "ready to grow," to become, perhaps, a corporate pastry chef, or even an executive chef. Everyone who loves bread and pastry will be watching to see what this talented and charming lady does next.