Fried Rice in Charleston

4 restaurants in Charleston list fried rice on their menus. The cheapest is Mama Kim's at $4.50. The typical price across town is $8.00, and the dearest we found is $17.00 at King Street Foods, so the two ends of the list are $12.50 apart, which is 278% more for the same dish. Of the 4 kitchens listed, 2 charge more than a dollar under the typical price, 1 sits within a dollar of it and 1 charges more than a dollar over.

Charleston is the only area where we track fried rice at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.

Where is the cheapest fried rice in Charleston? Mama Kim's, at $4.50 on 349 King Street. The same dish reaches $17.00 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $12.50.

What should fried rice cost here? About $8.00 is the typical price across the 4 kitchens in Charleston that list it. Of the ones listed above, 2 are more than a dollar below that and 1 is more than a dollar above, so the typical price is a middle rather than a floor.

Why do the prices differ so much? We compare what each menu calls the same dish, and menus are not identical: portion, cut, sides and the kind of room you are sitting in all ride on the price, and none of that shows up in a number. Part portions and half sizes are kept out of this comparison, and a chain charging the same at several addresses is counted once, so the spread above is between genuinely different kitchens rather than the same one repeated.