5 restaurants in Columbus list shrimp scampi pasta on their menus. The cheapest is Castello Pizza 2 at $13.99. The typical price across town is $17.99, and the dearest we found is $20.99 at Bravo! Italian Kitchen, so the two ends of the list are $7.00 apart, which is 50% more for the same dish. Of the 5 kitchens listed, 2 charge more than a dollar under the typical price, 1 sits within a dollar of it and 2 charge more than a dollar over.
Columbus is the only area where we track shrimp scampi pasta at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.
Where is the cheapest shrimp scampi pasta in Columbus? Castello Pizza 2, at $13.99 on 2070 Leonard Ave. The same dish reaches $20.99 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $7.00.
What should shrimp scampi pasta cost here? About $17.99 is the typical price across the 5 kitchens in Columbus that list it. Of the ones listed above, 2 are more than a dollar below that and 2 are 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 Columbus.