There’s no question that Howard Schultz has done a fine job since returning as CEO of Starbucks (SBUX) in January 2008. Starbucks was headed toward the abyss and now it’s not. But is he worth the $12.1 million he was paid in 2009?

That’s 25 percent more than he earned in his first year back. Earnings were up by 24 percent for the year as Schultz led the company’s effort to save $580 million. This amounts to an “extraordinary performance,” Starbucks said in an SEC filing last week, defending the decision to reward Schultz with a “bonus award” of $1 million for the year.

But for Jim Romenesko of the Starbucks Gossip blog, the cost savings are a negative. “In other words,” he wrote, paraphrasing the company’s language in the filing, “he was rewarded for closing stores and laying off people.”

That glib conclusion, which leaves out any speculation as to what might have happened if Schultz had simply allowed the company to keep heading down the crapper, comes as part of a question to his readers: Is Schultz being paid too much? Since many of the blog’s readers are employees, many of them disgruntled and nearly all of them anonymous, it’s no surprise that they think Schultz is overpaid. Romenesko’s question brought lots of predictably angry responses (and a few thoughtful ones, on both sides of the question).

Of course, $12 million is a lot of money, especially to a barista making $9 an hour. So is $3 million. And I guarantee that if Schultz made $3 million last year, the reaction would have been pretty much much the same.

Still, compared with other CEOs in the restaurant industry, Schultz’s compensation is pretty high—by some measures, maybe even spectacularly so. The industry average over the past two years is $3.7 million, according to the AFL-CIO’s CEO Paywatch database. Just two restaurant CEOs in that database earned more than $12 million (caveat: many 2009 salaries haven’t been added to the list yet)—James Skinner of McDonald’s (MCD), who earned $13.6 million in 2008, and YUM Brands‘ David Novak, whose 2008 compensation was an eye-popping $27.9 million. 

So is $12.1 million too much for turning around and trimming down the ailing, overbuilt, bloated Starbucks? Maybe, but that assessment is hard to make at this point—at least for me, if not for the company’s board. In another quarter or two, we’ll know for sure how justified Schultz’s compensation really is.