Grub Street Grub Street New York

At Tribeca Cinemas yesterday, Mario Batali was impressed with his own cameo in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Batali played Rabbit, a cook, and had two lines. "Wes called me out of the blue and said, 'Listen, do you want to do this?' And two weeks later we were taping it," the chef told us after the screening, which benefited his eponymous children's foundation. "I was in a sound studio on Horatio Street, and Wes was in this fabulous hotel in Paris. He told me what he wanted me to say, and I said it, and it worked." The chef's confidence was instilled in him by a screen veteran: "Stanley Tucci said I was perfect, and I’m assuming that he probably knows. But I was perfect in a one-line, voice-over kind of way."

Remember Joe Dobias, the mercurial chef-owner of JoeDoe who called out bloggers, publicists, and reviewers on Grub Street? Well, around the time of that interview he started a Twitter, and we’re wondering how the hell we didn’t notice it sooner. Some sample tweets, in no particular order.

Remember that episode of Celebrity Apprentice in which they raised money for charity by driving cupcake trucks around? Well, now that there actually is a cupcake truck, it’s happening in real life! Sort of. A press release informs us that the five-month-old Cupcake Stop truck was a “pioneer” in the mobile eatery trend (highly debatable) and goes on to tell us that on November 10, Joan Cusack will be serving cookies out of the truck in return for donations to Cookies for Kids’ Cancer. If you want to be served by a real-live celeb (who’s slightly more likable than Andrew Dice Clay), here’s the day’s schedule.

Diner’s Journal reports that Soho survivor Zoë will close at the end of the week after almost eighteen years. “It’s no longer a bastion of the art world the way it was,” says Stephen Laffredo, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Thalia. “We can only tweak the concept so far.” When Hal Rubenstein reviewed the restaurant in 2001, he noted a refreshing lack of Sex and the City scenesterism (you know, the type that would eventually inhabit Delicatessen nearby), and wrote, “Is it sad that familiar food and uncomplicated surroundings can feel so fresh and new? Should Zoë have closed and reopened under another name to capitalize on its reinvigoration? Can oh-so-fine but unfabulous survive? Geez, I hope so.” Well, it did. For a while.

Zoë to Close After Almost 18 Years in SoHo

If you thought the Heartschallenger truck was the smallest sweets ride around, think again: Cecilia Gomez makes and sells popcorn and cotton candy (at $1 per stick) out of the back of her vintage Jeep every Sunday from around 11 a.m. till nighttime. Look for it parked on Fifth Avenue, around 50th Street, in Sunset Park.

In the magazine this week, Adam Platt admires A Voce Columbus for its elegant design and moderate prices, but is most impressed by Missy Robbins’s food: “Like Mario Batali, Michael White, and the other masters of this comfort-obsessed rustico era, she has a knack for taking simple Italian basics and elevating them to a different plane.” Chris Smith checks in on Totonno's and finds that co-owner Louise Ciminieri “is painstakingly restoring the place to all its quirky glory.”