As soon as I signed up to attend the IMEX Conference in Las Vegas, my friend Michelle said, “Do you know about the secret pizza place?”

No. I didn’t. But I was already intrigued.

“Tell me!”

“There’s this secret pizza place in Las Vegas that everybody talks about. It’s inside the Cosmopolitan Hotel, but it isn’t marked. They don’t advertise. It doesn’t even have a name. It’s just this little hole-in-the-wall in the middle of this hotel that you have to look for. And it’s the best pizza in the world!”

Hhhmmm, I thought. I’ll be the judge of that. I just had to find the place first.

What isn’t shown in this picture is the Cosmopolitan Casino — an equally enormous building right next to the hotel. I couldn’t get a good shot of them both.

“It’s all based on word-of-mouth. As soon as you get to the Cosmopolitan, everyone in the elevators starts asking, ‘do you know about the secret pizza place?’ It’s genius. Everybody wants in on the secret and that’s all the marketing there is.”

Well– all the marketing there WAS. Apparently this secret pizza place has been featured on Food Network and the Travel Channel. But it still isn’t marked. You have to stumble around the Cosmopolitan to find it. If you’re lucky. Because here’s what happened to us:

A friend and I walked down the Las Vegas Strip on the way to the Cosmopolitan. We stopped to get tickets to a show and asked the counter person if she knew where the Secret Pizza Place was. She hadn’t even heard of it, but she turned to her co-workers and asked. The rest of them knew of it, but had never been there. “I’ve never found it,” one of them said.

The hunt was on. We entered the Cosmopolitan Casino and scouted out people to ask. We decided to try one of the cashiers first.

“Do you know where the Secret Pizza Place is?”

He nodded. “But I can’t tell you.”

We were having fun with this already. “Come on,” I begged. “Just a hint.”

He shrugged and said, “All I can tell you is it’s not on this floor.”

“Okay,” we said and started to back up to find someone else to ask when he piped up again. “You need to go up the escalator and then…”

I’m not going to tell you the rest of what he said. He gave us very specific directions that lead us right to the spot. I was hoping that maybe he was bluffing. Maybe he’d misdirected us and sent us on a wild goose chase, but no. His directions were exact. We were there within minutes and hadn’t had to look at all.

Luckily, we found the whole thing so absurd that we found the experience almost as fun as if we’d gone hunting. Almost. One thing was true: the pizza was delicious! I haven’t had real New York-style  pizza in years.

I won’t tell you where it is, but I will tell you that you’ll know you’re close when you find a record-lined hallway. And you’ll see people lined up. And you’ll SMELL Heaven!

Heaven doesn’t come cheap. A slice of this secret NY-style pizza is $5.00! But $5.00 was worth the fun. And later, when we saw other people talking about what they wanted to do, we asked them if they’d heard about the Secret Pizza Place? Some said yes, some said no, but we didn’t say more than that it’s at the Cosmopolitan and let them take it from there.

That’s all I’ll tell you, too. If you want to skip the fun hunt, ask the cashiers.

Would you rather try to find a secret place yourself or get directions?