Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Last week I drove 558 miles, one way, to watch a rodeo on the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona. Before I left, I bought some Fig Newtons, bananas and a box of Jujubes--my normal road food--and then drove nonstop through Quartzite and Tonopah and Show Low in the middle of the night.

I like trips like this. I like being alone and rolling down the windows when you’re crossing the desert in the darkness and the wind is so hot you feel like you’ve got your head stuck in an oven. I eat my Fig Newtons and keep my finger on the radio’s search button, pausing just long enough to hear the dedications from lonely women who call the stations after midnight, begging the deejays to please play Celine Dion’s “Love Can Move Mountains” or maybe “Two Hearts” from Phil Collins for “someone special.”

I drove all night, finally getting into Whiteriver, Ariz., about 7 in the morning just as the first cowboys were pulling into a dusty, red arena. I sat in the stands watching young kids named Vincent Shorty and Wilford Peaches ride nasty bulls named Gizmo and Nothing Matters, and I ate a few more of my Fig Newtons and one of the bananas, and then later I walked up the steep canyon where the rodeo was being held to a dirt road where three old women in long pioneer dresses were frying Indian bread in skillets the size of garbage can lids.

One woman sat on an upturned pail of lard patting out the balls of dough, and another took those balls and dropped them into two or three inches of sizzling lard until they were lightly brown on both sides, and then the third woman took the fried bread and wrapped it in a sheet of aluminum foil. The only other things on the menu were Indian tacos, which were just rounds of fried bread with beans and lettuce on them, and cowboy coffee, which was boiled instead of brewed.

I spent two days at the Fort Apache Indian Cowboy Rodeo, eating nothing but Fig Newtons and bananas and fried bread and cowboy coffee, and then I came home. And what I wanted, after a long bath, was a very cold Manhattan and a most excellent meal. I wanted to go somewhere with a lot of people who were beautifully dressed; where women passing by my table would smell faintly of White Shoulders; where the waiters talked in excited whispers about butterflied quail and olive tapenade and cremini mushrooms.

I wanted, in short, to have an experience that jolted my senses as severely as had the rodeo on the Apache Indian Reservation. Not because one experience would necessarily be better than the other, but because I am a creature of extremes and having lived for several days on nothing more elegant than fig-stuffed biscuits, I now was ready to slowly--very slowly--sip a well-chilled drink made from Knob Creek bourbon and Dubonnet, and to take pleasure in the subtle saltiness of thinly sliced bresaola spread across bitter arugula and smoky sweet fava beans.

Here’s the deal: I like to treat myself to an occasional excess, usually after some form of denial. It must be the Catholic boy in me. So I keep a small list of restaurants that I would love to go to, but there must be a reason. Something has to be given up before I will indulge myself. And even before I left for Arizona and the desert, I knew that when I returned, I would go to Bayside, a relatively new restaurant in Newport Beach near Balboa Island.

And that is what I did. With my skin still glowing red from the desert sun and the red dirt of the rodeo arena still in my nose, I had my Manhattan at the chic bar with its stylish parquet floor and the floor-to-ceiling tower that holds nearly 500 wines, and then I sat at a small table in the dining room eating thick, warm slices of sourdough baguettes, spreading it with sweet butter, eating slowly and deliberately while I looked over the wine list that had such a large selection of my favorite white--pinot gris--that I felt greedy and wanted to order two bottles.

It was just as difficult to select my dinner. There were oysters with a champagne mignonette that seemed just the thing after days in the dusty desert, and there were roasted red beets, which I love, with goat cheese and walnuts, and there was a herb-crusted chicken breast and a rack of lamb on mashed potatoes--all serious contenders--but in the end I settled on the evening’s four course menu: a crispy prawn fritter and seared tuna to satisfy my craving for something salty from the sea, and then the medallion of beef tenderloin followed by a warm chocolate souffle cake with amaretto ice cream. It was all most excellent.

Once I spent a month living like a hermit on Fuerteventura, a desert-like Canary Island off the coast of Africa. There were no fresh fruit or vegetables, and most of my meals came from cans opened with a Swiss army knife. One afternoon, after weeks of having eaten nothing more savory than freeze-dried chicken chunks, I came across a fisherman roasting giant sardines on green sticks over a driftwood fire. He invited me to join him.

The fish was oily, bony, and the most delicious meal I have ever had. That is the reward for abstinence. So maybe it was just the lingering taste of dough fried in old lard or the remembrance of the seedy, overly sweet Fig Newtons, but whatever it was, the succulent taste of the prawn fritter, the richness of the olive tapenade on the raw tuna and the delicate almond-flavored ice cream cutting through the warm chocolate souffle made my dinner at Bayside the best I’d had in years.

So good that I’m thinking of driving next week to Death Valley. And taking nothing with me but raisins and chocolate malt balls and bottled water. The very thought fills me with desire for loin of venison. And cool artichoke soup.

Dinner only, 5-10 p.m. Sunday-Wednesday; 5-11 p.m. Thursday-Saturday.

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.