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Ezekiel Emanuel has absolutely no qualifications to review restaurants and food. The only reason his reviews appear is because he argued with Corby Kummer about the merits of molecular gastronomy and Alice Waters' cooking. Zeke's cooking "untalents" were noticed early when, in AP chemistry, he and a few classmates decided to see what would happen to the hydrogen they collected in a flask from the hydrolysis of water if exposed to a match. By the time last shards of glass stopped bouncing--fortunately no injuries--the teacher had canceled all subsequent chemistry laboratories. And that had been very first laboratory of the year.

Emboldened, he majored in chemistry at Amherst College, and then took a research masters in biochemistry from Oxford, neither of which improved his cooking skills. His graduation from Harvard Medical School and a doctorate in political theory also failed to improve his ability to cook an egg.

It was only finding that his young daughters enjoyed baking--and then eating-- cakes, cookies, pies, brownies, tortes, and other goodies with their father, did Zeke master the fine art of desserts. He remains, in the words of one of his daughters, "the ugly chef"--those sweet things might taste good, but they surely fail the aesthetic presentation test.

Over the years, Zeke has written 3 books and edited 4--none of which are remotely related to food, unless exploitation, the topic of his last edited volume, seems vaguely relevant to the restaurant business. Since 1996 he has chaired the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Training people in the ethics of conducting research involving human beings has permitted him to take in the cuisines of many countries. From roasted lamb and lamb entrails in Mali to horse sashimi in Japan, from cuy (guinea pig) in Peru to duck in the waterways of Kerala, he has come to rely on prophylactic Pepto Bismol, which has never let him down.

From time to time, to relieve the weariness of writing in the style necessary for medical journal articles and in "bureaucratese" for government memos, Zeke has penned samizdat restaurant reviews for his colleagues and friends. Now you get to read them--or not-- too.