Salad in Charleston

33 restaurants in Charleston list salad on their menus. The cheapest is Bay Street Biergarten at $4.00, listed as Cucumber Salad. The typical price across town is $10.95, and the dearest we found is $18.00 at Brasserie La Banque, so the two ends of the list are $14.00 apart, which is 350% more for the same dish. Of the 33 kitchens listed, 13 charge more than a dollar under the typical price, 6 sit within a dollar of it and 14 charge more than a dollar over.

We track salad in 1103 other areas and compare them all on salad across United States. The typical price there runs $9.50 at the median, so Charleston is dearer than most of them, with a lower typical price than 240 of the 1103. The lowest best price anywhere we cover is $4.00 at Kennedy Pizza & Fried Chicken in Newark, NJ, and the highest best price is $13.95 in Mount Sinai, NY. The nearest area with it is Mount Pleasant, about 6 mi away, where the best price is $5.00.

Where is the cheapest salad in Charleston? Bay Street Biergarten, at $4.00 on 549 East Bay Street. The same dish reaches $18.00 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $14.00.

What should salad cost here? About $10.95 is the typical price across the 33 kitchens in Charleston that list it. Of the ones listed above, 13 are more than a dollar below that and 14 are more than a dollar above, so the typical price is a middle rather than a floor.

Is it cheaper nearby? The nearest area we track it in is Mount Pleasant, about 6 mi away, where the best price is $5.00. That is $1.00 more than the best price here.

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.