4 restaurants in Portland list cheese on their menus. The cheapest is Bistro 23 at $12.00, listed as CLASSIC CHEESE. The typical price across town is $15.00, and the dearest we found is $25.00 at Noble Rot, so the two ends of the list are $13.00 apart, which is 108% 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.
Portland is the only area where we track cheese at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.
Where is the cheapest cheese in Portland? Bistro 23, at $12.00 on 5530 Northeast 122nd Avenue. The same dish reaches $25.00 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $13.00.
What should cheese cost here? About $15.00 is the typical price across the 4 kitchens in Portland 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.
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 Portland.