Concept Behind the 88 Cities Project…

After work­ing two hel­la­cious months as a culi­nary pro­ducer on Bravo’s Top Chef All Stars in New York City, I was happy to be back in my home­town of Los Ange­les.  But I sud­denly real­ized how des­per­ately I needed to sat­isfy my hunger for the extra­or­di­nary culi­nary adven­tures I had expe­ri­enced while in New York. The only ques­tion was…how?

Is it pos­si­ble to find steamed pork belly buns as per­fect as David Chang’s from Momo­fuku Ssam? Is there a west coast equiv­a­lent to the honey but­ter drenched fried chicken bis­cuit at Pies and Thighs? Can Wylie Dufresne’s mol­e­c­u­lar take on eggs bene­dict at WD 50 be dupli­cated? (Or for that mat­ter his duck breast in a ched­dar cheese con­somme that is to date the most incred­i­ble thing I have ever tasted?)
Despite my imme­di­ate fear of dis­ap­point­ment, I under­stood that the only way to find out was to ven­ture out into the vast under (and upper) belly of Los Ange­les, and eat … as much as my heart, stom­ach.… and fiancee would allow.

Then the idea hit me: what if I could eat in every sin­gle city within Los Ange­les County? This would surely pro­duce at least a few culi­nary equiv­a­lents to my New York exploits… right? Wait…how many cities are there in LA County? Accord­ing to the county web­site there are a total of 88 cities that make up Los Ange­les County (click HERE for a full list of cities with pop­u­la­tion).  My imme­di­ate thought? Oh yes. This is absolutely happening.

**NOTE: Neigh­bor­hoods such as Sil­ver­lake, Sher­man Oaks, Stu­dio City and Venice, just to name a few, are notice­ably miss­ing off the 88 cities list. These are in fact dis­tricts, unin­cor­po­rated areas, or neigh­bor­hoods within LA and not tech­ni­cally cities. News to me! How­ever, I will still be eat­ing and writ­ing about all these fan­tas­tic foodie areas as well – along with the offi­cial 88!**

While New York spawned my ini­tial inspi­ra­tion, this has become more about uncov­er­ing the hid­den gems in my home­town of LA. Mom and pop, hole in the wall, greasy spoon, upscale steak­house and taco joint – the objec­tive is to try them all, and every­thing in between. The diver­sity of Los Ange­les is unpar­al­leled, which makes find­ing and eat­ing as many cuisines as pos­si­ble an absolute neces­sity. Viet­namese, Ethiopian, Mex­i­can, Ital­ian, Peru­vian…. The list goes on.

With the help of Yelp, hours of research and my many foodie friends, I have devised a list of where I think I should eat in each city. This is in no way set in stone and I am fully open to any sug­ges­tions along the way!  Please email me at joplin@joplinshouse.com  if you have a place I shouldn’t pass up!

Much love and happy eating!

Joplin