Plot Synopsis

Jeff Mauro travels across America, spending only 24 hours in each city with a food budget of only $24. Along the way, he learns about the city and its people, while even getting a few cooking lessons. Each 30-minute episode highlights one city and in the first season, Jeff travels to: Chicago, where he goes back to his hometown and enjoys cinnamon rolls, smokes meat, gets tough cooking lessons from a Chicago alderman, and puts in a late-night dance performance at his favorite beef place; Cleveland, where he explores the city's obsession with corned beef, slings hash, has chili for lunch, finds unbelievable bar food, and has his guitar debut on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum stage; Los Angeles, where he dabbles in the food of many different cultures -- Greek, Cuban and Korean -- before finishing the day with fresh, hot American mini-donuts; Minneapolis, where he finds amazing and cheap Mexican dishes and learns how to "walk a fish" in a deep fryer; Boston, where he samples breakfast under a real grape arbor at a Portuguese diner, a huge clam chowder bread bowl lunch at Faneuil Hall, a Sicilian rice ball for dinner, and a Cannoli dessert in the city's historic North End; and New York, where he has breakfast across the bridge in Brooklyn with the cheapest, best, biggest bagel sandwich ever, followed by artichoke pizza for lunch, Southern fried chicken for dinner, and a not-so-classic donut for dessert. Food Network aired a sneak-peek episode of this series on Sunday, September 23, 2012 at 10pm ET, followed by the official series premiere the next day on Monday, September 24, 2012 at 10:30pm ET.