I'm able to return a location's details by sending a query via the graph api with the location's ID, however I'm looking to achieve the reverse - effectively find location id by sending a request containing the location name (city, state etc). Is this possible?
This is possible under a few different approaches. You can either search using long / lat positions and put the place name into the query. This search will search places only.
Do the following
This will return ritual coffee.
Another way is to search through facebook pages using the following https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=ritual%20coffee&type=page&access_token=mytoken
This way is more difficult as you will obviously need to parse the list in more detail.