3 restaurants in Columbia list grilled asparagus on their menus. The cheapest is Union Jacks at $5.00. The typical price across town is $8.00, and the dearest we found is $10.00 at The Turn House, so the two ends of the list are $5.00 apart, which is 100% more for the same dish. Of the 3 kitchens listed, 1 charges more than a dollar under the typical price, 1 sits within a dollar of it and 1 charges more than a dollar over.
Columbia is the only area where we track grilled asparagus at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.
Where is the cheapest grilled asparagus in Columbia? Union Jacks, at $5.00 on 10400 Little Patuxent Parkway. The same dish reaches $10.00 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $5.00.
What should grilled asparagus cost here? About $8.00 is the typical price across the 3 kitchens in Columbia that list it. Of the ones listed above, 1 is 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.
Items are grouped by dish, so names vary a little between restaurants. Each price is what that menu listed on the date shown beside it, not a daily special, so a restaurant may have changed it since. The typical price is the middle of every price we hold for this dish in Columbia.