Who gets the bill in the restaurant?

It's one of the most infuriating sentences uttered at a restaurant table. You forgo starters with heavy heart (and empty stomach), turn down the marbled temptations of grass-fed fillet for the terrine-à-la-cheap-cuts, go halves on dessert with an equally frugal friend, only to have some cheery-faced lout down the other end of the table holler, “So shall we just split the bill then?”

Ever since the opening of the first restaurant, when the first bill hit the first table, diners have looked at each other and intoned the bill-splitters' mantra: “So how shall we do this?”

In China, tradition dictates an increasing vigorous tussle over the bill until, like the alpha-male in an Attenborough documentary, the most senior of the herd wins the day and settles the debt alone. In contrast, it's not unusual in Germany for each diner to be presented with their own itemised bill.

In the UK, however, we flit between paying individually, splitting evenly or some mathematically complicated mixture of the two – leading to frustration, distress and, in some cases, some highly mercenary tactical dish-selection.

Firstly, there's the plight of the small eater. It is perhaps a sign of modern fashions that eating lightly (especially if you're nurturing a healthy BMI) is now severely frowned upon in polite company. The words “don't tell me you're on a diet!” are usually enough to shame the modest eater into ordering an unwanted chocolate fondant with cream. Social niceties then dictates that no fuss be made over one's own portion of the theoretical bill; instead, hope rests on the chance that some conscientious white knight will quietly point out that Amanda only had the soup and half a chocolate fondant, and insist that the remaining bill is split. Split, that is, equally among everyone else present.

The question of alcohol consumption is another flammable after-dinner topic. Better the teetotaller be, than the one who nurses a solitary glass of wine the whole evening only to be lumped in with “the drinkers” when the night's damage is tallied up across a bottle-strewn table.

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