Mulligatawny Soup in Columbia

3 restaurants in Columbia list mulligatawny soup on their menus. The cheapest is House of India at $6.95. The typical price across town is $7.99, and the dearest we found is $12.00 at Royal Taj, so the two ends of the list are $5.05 apart, which is 73% 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 mulligatawny soup at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.

Where is the cheapest mulligatawny soup in Columbia? House of India, at $6.95 on 9350 Snowden River Parkway. The same dish reaches $12.00 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $5.05.

What should mulligatawny soup cost here? About $7.99 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.