Chef Grant Soto wants Mark McEwan to take him out for lunch

Ever since Chef Grant Soto outed himself as aspiring screenwriter Taylor Clarke, the Toronto food scene’s resident Twitter troll has lost some of his edge. Sure, he still skewers pretentious foodies and self-important chefs (and most recently, Winterlicious), but the shtick just doesn’t work as well without the secrecy. Now Soto/Clarke is upping the stakes: he’s set up a petition on do-gooder platform Change.org asking Mark McEwan to take him out to lunch (he’s billing it as “a highly charged confrontation between two legends coming face to face for the first time”). Clarke told Maclean’s he’s hoping to ask the celebrity chef and owner of One, Bymark, North 44° and Fabbrica about the evolution of Toronto’s food scene as research for Chef Grant Soto, a television show he’s developing. And somehow, he’s already amassed 63 signatories to his cause. See the petition »

(Images: Soto, Twitter; McEwan, Top Chef Canada)