3 restaurants in Washington list baked penne on their menus. The cheapest is Mo Dough Pizza & Italian Cucina at $10.50, listed as Baked Penne Lunch. The typical price across town is $15.25, and the dearest we found is $15.95 at Dicola's Pizza, so the two ends of the list are $5.45 apart, which is 52% more for the same dish. Of the 3 kitchens listed, 1 charges more than a dollar under the typical price, 2 sit within a dollar of it and 0 charge more than a dollar over.
Washington is the only area where we track baked penne at the moment, so there is no other town to set these prices against yet.
Where is the cheapest baked penne in Washington? Mo Dough Pizza & Italian Cucina, at $10.50 on 230 NJ-31. The same dish reaches $15.95 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $5.45.
What should baked penne cost here? About $15.25 is the typical price across the 3 kitchens in Washington that list it. Of the ones listed above, 1 is more than a dollar below that and 0 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 Washington.