Few topics get Seattle talking faster than its restaurants. This week, the city's dining scene was once again under scrutiny, with the dispute turning on whether complaints about eating out are really about food quality or about what everything costs now.

With prices rising across Seattle, a high restaurant bill alone says little about whether the food was any good. But that explanation only goes so far: dining out here is unusually expensive even compared with other high-cost cities, and the expensive restaurants are not reliably the good ones. Plenty of diners would be perfectly happy with cheap, mediocre food. Paying premium prices for the same meal is the source of the frustration.

Price and quality also figure in a broader criticism of Seattle dining: the apparent absence of an entire cheap-but-good tier. Without a taco-truck or bodega-style local staple like those in other cities, the distance between a quick, cheap bite and a full sit-down splurge seems wider here than elsewhere.

Specific neighborhood spots already serve as affordable, good places to eat, though, which raises the possibility that visibility, rather than absence, is the bigger issue. Those places exist, but expensive restaurants dominate the conversation and drown them out. The dispute over Seattle's mid-tier dining depends in part on whether affordable meals are genuinely scarce or whether the places serving them simply aren't getting enough attention.