Bay Area Biscotti Co By Art Nadler There's nothing like dunking a biscotti cookie into a cup of espresso after dinner, taking a bite and savoring the exquisite flavor as it rolls across the tongue and up into the nose. Unfortunately, most biscotti are as hard as a rock, and you could end up cracking a crown and ruining the whole experience. Not so with Arlene Damele's biscotti. They're doubled baked with only fresh ingredients and no preservatives. Nothing in her Italian cookies will harden in a few days and turn them into miniature slabs of concrete.

Damele's Bay Area Biscotti Co. was born in Southern Nevada eight years ago. Damele, who lived in Northern California, had worked as a national executive job recruiter. So when the market flattened out in 1991, she decided to take a hiatus and pursue the possibility of starting her own business. Over the years, Damele had made anise biscotti for family and friends, and many of them suggested she might try her hand at the lucrative bakery business. One day while staying at her vacation condominium in Las Vegas, she ran across a bakery for sale in a small strip shopping center near Torrey Pines Drive and West Sahara Boulevard. In 1992, the aspiring entrepreneur decided to purchase the bakery and reopened it as a combination coffee shop and bakery. Her biscotti were an immediate hit. "I was the first one to put a coffee shop in," Damele says of the days before Seattle-style coffee shops invaded Las Vegas. "I only knew how to make anise at the time, but everyone liked them." Damele began packaging her biscotti into colorful red, white, green and black boxes. She called the cookies Biscotti Dameli - changing the letter "e" in her last name to an "i" because she liked the way it played off the last letter in biscotti. She also developed other flavors - lemon peel, hazelnut, almond chocolate chip, orange decadence and marble decadence. Nothing goes to waste at Damele's bakery, as the left over end pieces of biscotti are crushed, coated with chocolate and transformed into delicious candy bars Damele has been successful in having her cookies sold in all the major hotels in Las Vegas and some in the Northern Nevada area. They're also in fine dining restaurants and retail shops throughout the state. Wild Oats grocery stores and Smiths and Albertson's supermarkets carry them. Nationally, Biscotti Dameli is sold in Northern California, Beverly Hills and Newport Beach, Calif. Soon, Demele says, they will be sold in New York, Philadelphia, Nashville and New Orleans. "My dream is to have a biscotti factory and have tours, so people can see how they are made," an excited Demele says. In 1995, Damele moved her bakery to a larger 1,800 square-foot facility off Industrial Road in Las Vegas. She still does most of the sales herself and has five fulltime and seven part-time employees do the baking. Recently, she hired a national sales representative to sell her biscotti domestically and internationally. "We pretty much can do any type of custom work," Damele says. "People just tell us what they want and how much they want and how much they want to spend." For more information, contact: The Bay Area Biscotti Co., 3125 Ali Baba Lane, Suite 706, Las Vegas, NV. 89118. Phone: 1-800-497-9556. Fax: (702) 795-8704.