THE EGG MEN.(Scott Gutstein)

Las Vegas is a city built by breakfast specials. Sex and gambling, too, of course, and divorce and vaudeville and the creative use of neon. But the energy for all that vice had to come from somewhere, and mostly it came from eggs. In the early days, when depositing your savings in machines designed to cheat you still seemed a dubious proposition, the casinos offered cut-rate rooms and airfares. And eggs, always eggs. "They used to line up down the hall for the ninety-nine-cent special," a cook from the old Lindy's cafe in the Flamingo told me. "One time, so much grease built up in the ceiling that it came down the walls and set fire to the flat-tops. Pretty soon, the hood caught on fire and the extinguishers went off with that chemical that looks like smoke, and then the Fire Department came in. Everybody just kept on eating. They said, 'Does this mean my food will take longer now?' "

The ninety-nine-cent special has been lost to history: the new Vegas rarely stoops to giveaways. The empty stretch of desert where Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo, in 1946, has become the center of the Strip, home to America's thirteen largest hotels. (The MGM Grand, which has 5,044 rooms, is the largest; the Flamingo is eighth, with 3,545.) Up the street, at the Wynn hotel, which opened this spring, two eggs can cost eleven-fifty, and a caviar breakfast for two with Dom Perignon is three hundred and fifty dollars from room service. Even Lindy's has had a makeover. It calls itself the Tropical Breeze Cafe now. Its nicotine-yellow walls have been repainted a sunnier shade, and it looks out on a water garden populated by turtles, koi, and some disgruntled-looking penguins from southern Africa.

Still, a good egg, honestly cooked, is what brings in most customers, and they eat them in staggering quantities. Last year alone, the cooks at the Tropical Breeze cracked well over a million of them. As a woman at the local Culinary Workers Union put it, "Egg cooks are worth their weight in gold in this town."

At six o'clock on a recent Saturday morning, a few early risers and ashen-faced all-nighters were already gathered in front of the cafe hostess. Scott Gutstein, the cafe's head chef, could hear the white noise of their chatter picking up volume, like the leading edge of some oceanic weather system. "You can feel it building," he said, sitting in his cramped office next to a walk-in refrigerator. "I worked swing shift last night. Busy. When I came out at midnight, the streets were packed." He scanned the inventory list on his computer one more time--on an average day, the Tropical Breeze consumes some three hundred pounds of bacon alone--then buttoned up his white, double-breasted jacket. He checked the pocket on his left sleeve for his kitchen implements, which were color-coded for quick access: blue thermometer, red paring knife, black pager, yellow highlighter. Then he leaned over to read a handwritten sheet taped on the door by his assistant chef.

"O.K., here's the lineup," he said. "We've got Martin, the omelette man, and Joel on over-easies. Rene is doing pancakes and French toast--he's so strong, he just pushes it out--and we have Debbie on the eggs Benedict. I'm not used to watching women cook in high-stress situations, but she's surprised the shit out of me. She kicks ass. Frankie will do the steak and eggs, and Edgar will fill in for whoever is taking a break." He grinned. "You can't hurt these guys. I mean, I've been all over the country in all kinds of kitchens. I've worked in New Jersey. I've worked in L.A. I thought I saw the best, but these guys? Nasty."

Gutstein, who is thirty-eight, was born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, a loyal Yankees fan even in their most fruitless years. He keeps a dusty Don Mattingly mug on his desk and a picture of Joe DiMaggio at spring training on the wall, and likes to think of his cooks as their short-order equivalents. When he describes their feats at the grill, his voice grows clipped and overheated, like an announcer's on AM radio: "I thought Bally's was busy next door. This place annihilates it. By a thousand covers a day. With less people." Gutstein has a round, eager face that's perpetually flushed, with pale eyebrows and fleshy earlobes. He has wide brown eyes and short, sausagy arms, and the over-all demeanor of a very large and very precocious toddler, given to bursts of impatience and spleen, but mostly just happy to be there, watching things flip and whirl around him.

Saturday morning is zero hour for short-order cooks. The cafe, which prepares some twenty-five hundred meals on an average weekday, may serve an extra thousand on weekends, with the same cooks. As Gutstein made his way down the long galley kitchen, between the line of grills, griddles, and deep fryers against the wall and the stainless-steel serving counter, with its hot lights and warming trays, his cooks were entrenching themselves for the breakfast rush. They plunged quadruple baskets of chopped potatoes into hot oil, pre-poached three dozen eggs, and mixed hash in a tub the size of a baptismal font. Busboys squeezed past with stacks of plates two feet high. Runners jogged in with carts of diced peppers and onions, mushrooms, bacon, and shredded cheese. "They're bringing the troops ammunition," Gutstein said. Then he looked around with a satisfied smirk. "The best term for it is 'controlled chaos,' " he said. "It gets crazy. I love it. Grown men come out of here crying."

I first heard of the short-order cooks of Las Vegas nearly twenty years ago, when I was working at a breakfast place in Seattle called Julia's 14-Carat Cafe. By then, I'd cooked at a half-dozen restaurants and hamburger joints, and spent two months as the chef at a nursing home, making dishes like American Souffle. (Take two loaves of white bread, slather each slice with oleo, douse with egg substitute, and bake.) But those were just summer jobs, for the most part. Julia's was full-time work, and it wasn't clear that I had anything better waiting for me. I'd been out of college for a year, and frying eggs had begun to…