Here are the 'Eggscellent 8' Breakfast Bowl finalists who are still in the running to be named Tampa Bay's Breakfast Bowl champion. Now's your chance to determine the Final Flippin' Four; voting begins today, Friday Mar. 25, and ends on Monday, March 28, between 5 and 6 p.m.

We here at CL will be judging the Final Four restaurants in our own taste-a-thon. The champ will be crowned by Food Critic Brian Ries (with the help of his Breakfast Club posse) and announced in the issue of April 7.

I'd say that Round 3 was either downright cutthroat — especially getting down to the last 24 hours of voting — or nonexistent, as some eateries just seemed to secede altogether.

The latter included the races between La Tropicana and Tre Amici of Ybor, Mimi's Cafe and Three Coins, and Banyan Coffee & Tea and Cassis of Downtown St. Pete; all put up pretty strong fights in the last two rounds, but when the losing parties seemed to give up, the other party's voters stopped voting as well (as long as they were still ahead).

As for the former group, the big races were between Pinky's and the Brunchery, Lenny's and Kelly's Chic-A-Boom, and Bowled and Munch's Sundries — each bout going back and forth in either direction more than once in the last two days.

Our biggest vote-getter ended up being the Kelly's vs. Lenny's poll with 17,980 total votes. Kelly's had it in the bag until the last hour or two, Lenny's ending up with 9,413 votes to Kelly's 9,029.

Bowled vs. Munch's was another very heated race. Besides each camps' troops tirelessly clicking away at all hours of the day and night to lead their restaurant to victory, there was also some very colorful (to put it nicely) commentary going on between the two parties. In the end, Bowled took the win with 8,032 votes to Munch's 6,324.

Brunchery and Pinky's battle in South Hillsborough ended with Pinky's coming up from behind in the last few hours and sweeping Brunchery with 3,731 to 2451 votes.

All quarrels and trash-talking aside, I think one commenter put it best: "Everybody wins. We all get good food." And isn't it the truth?

There's only one round left to determine the winner of each region and to see who will go on to The Final Four and possible overall victory.

Voting for Round 4 begins at cltampa.com/breakfastbowl on Fri., March 25, between 9 and 9:06 a.m., and ends Monday, March 28, between 5 and 5:06 p.m. Each poll is scheduled to start and end 2 minutes apart.

This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2011.