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Season 5 of Top Chef has been pretty great…lots of what’s looked like good food, without some of the annoying drama of previous seasons. Sure, there’s the pseudo-romance between Hosea and Leah, but that’s over, now that Leah’s been sent packing her knives. Yes, the final four are Fabio, Stefan, Carla and Hosea. If you’d asked me a month ago, I would have guessed Stefan and Hosea, but I think my other two picks would have been Leah and Jamie.

Not that Fabio and Carla haven’t made some interesting dishes, but Fabio, while always making us laugh, has usually ended up in the middle of the pack, and big-haired, crazy-eyed Carla was such a late bloomer.

Major props to Fabio for winning the elimination challenge with a broken finger…man, that looked nasty. Hopefully we’ll find out how exactly that happened at some point.

Now it’s off to New Orleans…at this point it’s anybody’s game. SuperSmug Stefan impresses a lot of the time, but when he gets overconfident, he usually chokes. Hosea’s been consistently strong, but his choices sometimes leave one half of the judges or the other cold, not to mention the technical issues that have come up from time to time. Carla’s simple, earthy approach has been wowing people the last few weeks especially, so it’ll be interesting to see how she navigates the local New Orleans cuisine that I’m sure will factor into the final challenges. And Fabio…well, I just hope whatever he cooks that he makes it count, and that he whips out at least one more monkey ass before all is said and done.