A pinanta district, a double digit number of pirate themed bars, a pizza place where you have to park in an alley and have some teenager run out of the parlor (which may or may not be their studio apartment), a rotating cocktail lounge that spins while you look at the entire panoramic of Los Angeles at night, and an art gallery inside of a brewery. This fragment is just a few of the things that exist in Los Angeles that you didn’t know about.

We at In Search of a City love this city, and that is what Los Angeles is: a city. It took (500) Days of Summer to get us out to a bench in a park with decent view of architecture, Beginners to get us running around the lobby at the Biltmore, and Drive to get us cruising around Echo Park (not in hopes of getting shot or anything, just for the sake of feeling like a badass listening to Kavinsky). People we talk to either assume that Los Angeles isn’t that cool or that the really cool things, the ones that people see in movies or in their brains while intoxicated and for some reason wondering why they can’t be part of the in crowd, are things that they can never get into. And we’re here to tell you that the so called “coolest” places in Los Angeles, the places with the bouncer named Skillet and that one song from Adele that boils our blood mashed into anything by Journey, are not the coolest places at all. Or perhaps you never thought those were cool places but weren’t quite sure where the coolest places were. And that’s why we’re here to hold your hand and lead you into a tiny “mall” in Koreatown for $1.99 Soju bottles and movie theaters renovated by Quentin Tarantino.

We are Thea Green and Christopher Weiss, and we love this city and the constant exploration that it brings.