Much of the work behind this project has involved compiling a body of research and history that has never been compiled before. As much as Angelenos love their restaurants, we’ve done a pretty terrible job historicizing them, So for the past year, with the great help of my undergraduate and graduate students at USC, I’ve been trying to mend that gap: searching archives of the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Star, the Los Angeles Herald, the California Eagle, La Opinion, & many other local papers; restaurant memoirs; national restaurant histories; Los Angeles histories; menu design histories; Food sociology and anthropology scholarship; Gourmet, Sunset, and American Cookery back issues; Negro Green Book archives; novels, songs, poems, films, anywhere a restaurant, a menu, or a plate of food shows up in the general vicinity of Los Angeles. In the coming months, I will post an extensive bibliography here, which I hope will be of help to future researchers.