Her intent, when she started hiddenlosangeles.com, a site geared to "embracing the depths beneath the shallow" as its subtitle reads, was to celebrate the lesser-known aspects and history of Los Angeles, to examine out-of-the-way gems and unknown stories, clothing stores and hiking trails, photos from the '50s and a view from modern-day Skid Row. She began using a page on Facebook to promote the site and found a distinctly passionate audience: food fanatics.

Food-centric questions and recommendations dwarf every other subject on the Facebook page. Identifying the location of a Polish doughnut shop is more imperative to its fans than finding a new hiking trail. Most of the talk is congenial, although there are some fights beyond the subject of taco tracks -- defenders of two downtown lunch favorites, Cole's and Philippe's, for example, like to lay into one another.

After noticing a few friends had signed up for Garrett's Facebook page, I ventured over and was immediately taken in. One guy wanted to know whether there was "a restaurant where you sit on the floor," and another visitor asked for tips on "nuns making pumpkin bread in the Hollywood Hills." There were recommendations for spicy soup, fish burritos and egg rolls, and requests for mango sticky rice, curry houses and pho in West L.A. Finding non-food subjects was a chore.

What was fascinating was the rate at which the page moved: No recommendation or question stayed on the home page for more than an hour -- not as fast as Twitter, granted, but it gives visitors time to look around and lacks the slow laboriousness of a chat room. Garrett's page has the pleasant steady pace of a train pulling into its final station.

"The speed is in its favor," says Garrett, who is currently designing board games. "It encourages discussion. The page goes fast enough that anyone concerned about a place being discovered, well, after a few hours it's hidden again. And there's no search function."

Foodies amp up the Hidden Los Angeles Facebook page

A stream of return visitors has allowed Garrett to create yet another page: Hidden Los Angeles - The Foodie Page, the rare non-promotional Facebook forum that promotes ditching the computer and experiencing the unknown in the real world. It also points out the powerful role social media can have. We've seen it on Twitter, which food journalist Jonathan Gold astutely noted, has turned taco truck vendors, vegan community organizers and teachers of butcher classes into rock stars. Twitter, though, is a bit too fast for those who still prefer reviews from critics and recommendations from flesh-and-blood friends. Facebook provides a nice transition, a bit of random information to expand our own horizons.

Garrett, who hopes to someday turn the "Hidden" concept into a community-based business, is dumbstruck when it comes to explaining the growth of her audience. The Facebook pages were set up to drive traffic to hiddenlosangeles.com and they certainly did, pushing her website traffic from a mere 343 on Feb. 1 to more than 17,000 unique daily users today. But the real explosion occurred on Facebook, where the original Hidden Los Angeles page grew from 2,000 fans on Feb. 1 to more than 140,000 today. The Foodie Page now has more than 38,000 fans.

A recommendation for Bill's Burgers in Van Nuys led two fans who didn't know each other to visit the small hamburger stand at the same time. They wound up dining together. "That's pretty amazing," says Garrett with an enthusiasm that overpowers the exhaustion in her voice. "This is about people going outside and enjoying their city."

To that end, Garrett has started organizing cocktail parties for her Facebook fans and site visitors. The first was at the legendary Hollywood watering hole Musso & Frank. "About 60 people showed up," she says. "They walked in like it was their living room. People of all different ages, completely different backgrounds, talking to one another. One kid with a mohawk was all dressed up and sitting next to a friend of mine who is an 80-year-old African-American jazz singer. The owner and his dad were just shaking their heads that this came off. One of my favorite compliments came from a guy who saw L.A. as very isolated. He signed up for the page and wrote 'the city just got a little smaller.' "

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