Picnicking at the bar

AT SW Steakhouse in Wynn Las Vegas, you can certainly do the full-bore experience, occupying a table in the hubbuby (in the best sense) dining room bestride the Lake of Dreams, attending to chilled seafood and pampered cuts of beef and truffled this and that.

You also could do what I call picnicking at the bar (especially when you’re just one or two). Picnicking requires less commitment than the main restaurant — it’s perfectly fine to order just an appetizer with a glass of wine. Service is quicker, too, and you never know whom you might meet on the next stool.

A recent picnic dinner at the bar featured carpaccio ($30), a Spanish sparkling ($18) and the restaurant’s wondrous pull-apart monkey bread (free).

The carpaccio, fashioned from famed Snake River Farms beef, generously blanketed a large plate, the beef strewn with arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and shaved Parmesan. The dish: salty, nutty, peppery, sweet. A stem of Raventós i Blanc de Nit Rosé sparkling wine, from Spain, made concord with carpaccio.

It’s a “gorgeous sparkler that allows the beef to sing while the bubbles enhance the pepper in the arugula and the natural sweetness of the sun-dried tomatoes,” said Brian Weitzman, executive director of wine at Wynn. (Raventós dates to the late 15th century and makes some of Spain’s finest wines. If you haven’t tried them, do.)

And now to the bread. Ah, me, this bread. “Its mother was a brioche and its father a pretzel bread,” as Wynn explains, justly praising the pull-apart’s soft texture, buttery glaze and “final zap of pretzel salt.” The bread is served warm, and no one would blame you if you wanted to picnic all evening on the bread alone.

For more information, visit wynnlasvegas.com/dining.

Steel Brook Las Vegas Review-journal The carpaccio and monkey bread, alongside a Raventós i Blanc, at SW Steakhouse.