Top Chef: New York: Oh, how the mighty have fallen

Top Chef: New York showed the perils of overconfidence this week. First, it brought back some of the cockier chefs from days of yore (I'm looking at you, Spike!). Then, it showed the consequences of letting arrogance flavor your food. Tasty!

Insert football catchphrase spoiler here. Sorry, not my sport.

It's football season, so we've got a couple of football-themed challenges. The Quickfire involves the sort of football square setup used in Superbowl pools. Put your name in a square, and find out what category and special ingredient you'll be dealing with! But it's a psyche-out, because the "special ingredient" is actually a product placement, so everyone is cooking with oats.

Jamie's category is fruit, so of course she makes fish. Sure, there's a nectarine salsa involved, but I'm not sure it really qualifies as "fruit three ways," as she claims. The shrimp was the star of the dish, not the coconut used to flavor it, and avocado crème fraîche? That doesn't count toward you recommended daily allowance of fruits and veggies.

Leah actually picks seafood as her category, which is worrying since she failed so spectacularly at fish the week before. She tries to hedge her bets by adding bacon, thinking it makes everything better. Sorry, Leah -- even the miracle ingredient can't save you this time...

Fabio does a bizarre oat-encrusted eggplant cup for his veggie dish, which looks like too much roughage for my tastes. Jeff continues to cook several things decently, but nothing spectacularly. Focus, Jeff! Stefan does a nice oatmeal-banana mousse, although he may have been trying to kill guest judge Scott Conant by saying sure, you can eat the decorative rose I put on the plate! Carla goes crazy with the grains, making oat-encrusted tofu with lentil salad, and Hosea makes an oat-crusted schnitzel.

Scott picks Fabio, Leah and Jeff as the bottom three, and Carla, Jamie and Stefan as the top. Stefan wins it all, which has everyone but Fabio rolling their eyes -- great, he gets to be even MORE cocky. Well, you know what they say about pride and falls? Just wait...

The Elimination Challenge
The current chefs go up against chefs from the past in a head-to-head cooking competition using regional ingredients from the home cities of seven NFL teams. They'll have 20 minutes to cook in front of an audience.

As the winner of the quickfire, Stefan gets to choose both his team and his competitor. He picks Dallas, and season 1's Andrea, reasoning that (1) she got kicked off early, (2) she basically only cooks with vegetables, and (3) she's cute and he wants an excuse to hit on her. That's one way to go about it, I guess. Part three seems to be working out for him -- they flirt and preen, and Stefan is having a blast, at least until the judges speak up. See, the judges have a split decision on their dishes, and the fans in the stands overwhelmingly prefer Andrea's dish. Stefan gets no points, and he'll be up for elimination.

Jeff goes up against Season 2's Josie with flavors from Miami, and they're doing dueling ceviches. Jeff is contemptuous of Josie's warm ceviche -- it's not really ceviche! he sneers! --  but both judges and fans come down on her side. Once again, he put a whole lot of different elements on the plate.

Fabio cooks against Spike from season 4 with food from Green Bay. That means venison, plus Fabio tries to throw some cheese in there to make it authentic. But Fabio overcooked the venison, so the judges give Spike the win. The fans, however, pick Fabio.

The rest of Season 5's cheftestants do better. Carla sweeps Season 4's Andrew in the New Orleans cook off -- her gumbo beats his crawfish crudo (and god-awful accent) any day. Hosea also wins big with his crispy salmon roll for Seattle, beating Season 1's Miguel handily. Leah wins the judges over with her seared strip steak representing New York, but Season 4's Nikki wins the fan's vote for her chicken livers. Jamie also gets a split decision from the judges, but the fans prefer her crab cioppino over the mustard-glazed crab and miso sweet potatoes that Season 3's Camille serves. This means that Season 5 comes out ahead on points, and they've won the Battle of the All Stars.

The Judging Table
The judges all praise Carla, and Toby goes so far as to say "I could taste the love this time." Leah gets some faint praise -- she said she wanted to do a simple dish, and Tom says yep, that's what you gave us. Scott seems to be joining the Jamie appreciation society, talking about how great it was to watch her cook, while Hosea wins plaudits for making a roll that was nice and crispy but still perfectly cooked on the inside.

Then there's the bottom three, and it's a festival of defensiveness. Scott really doesn't like Fabio -- and I can sort of understand it, considering Fabio seemed ready to argue with everything Scott said. However, he did seem to come down a little hard on Fabio. Stefan was gobsmacked that he was there at all, and got chided for losing to someone he chose to compete against. See what I mean about pride and falls? Take that, Stefan!

Jeff you gets the worst of it -- once again, he did too many things, and what he calls "refined," the judges thought was tasteless and watered down. Besides, he can't sneer that Josie didn't do a "real" ceviche because it was warm, when he precooked the shrimp in his dish. "I thought I did about 19 more things than she did," Jeff protests. Yeah -- but that's part of the problem.

In the end, Jeff packs up his knives. He's shocked -- he thought Fabio was a goner. He pledges to be true to his overthinking, overly complicated self.

Highlights, thoughts and odds and end:

• Carla wins Superbowl tickets for winning the challenge. She flips out. It's kind of adorable.
• Fabio sneers when he discovers his category for the quickfire is vegetables: "There is no reason to eat vegetables when there's meat and fish around."
• Later, during the elimination challenge, Fabio muses on the time limit: "It's not cooking, it's rushing. But I'm a professional chef. There's nothing that can stress me out. If they're going to give me monkey ass to fill with fried bananas, I'll come up with something." Note to self: Avoid Fabio's restaurant, as he seems obsessed with simian hindquarters.
• Speaking of monkeys -- Carla, on Jeff's complexity problem: "He can't quiet the creative monkeys. He just needs to rein them in." He sure does, because otherwise, Fabio will start cooking their rear ends.
• Carla is thrilled to be going up against Andrew, because she thinks he's adorable. Aieee! It's a quirk-off!
• Jamie admits that she had a larger reason for choosing to cook for The Forty-Niners: "I knew if I didn't pick San Francisco, I'd get so much sh*t for it when I went home...."
• Fabio, lamenting the living arrangements: "I'm 30 years old and I have to sleep in the bunky bed."
• Fabio also mentions that he wants to win Top Chef so he can help take care of his sick mother. That seems to have come out of nowhere...
• Tom, on Fabio's overcooked elimination dish: "I really  liked the sauce a lot, but the venison was already dead -- there was no need to kill it."

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