Tomato Soup in Seattle

6 restaurants in Seattle list tomato soup on their menus. The cheapest is Seattle Grill & Pizza at $4.99. The typical price across town is $7.99, and the dearest we found is $12.00 at Goldfinch Tavern, so the two ends of the list are $7.01 apart, which is 140% more for the same dish. Of the 6 kitchens listed, 3 charge more than a dollar under the typical price, 1 sits within a dollar of it and 2 charge more than a dollar over.

Seattle is the only area where we track tomato soup at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.

Where is the cheapest tomato soup in Seattle? Seattle Grill & Pizza, at $4.99 on 12336 Lake City Way NE. The same dish reaches $12.00 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $7.01.

What should tomato soup cost here? About $7.99 is the typical price across the 6 kitchens in Seattle that list it. Of the ones listed above, 3 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.