1) On arrival the waitress asks whether you'd like to sit in smoking or non-smoking. She then ushers you towards a cramped table next to the family from hell which is so close to the fog of the smoking section that she might as well not have bothered asking you in the first place.
2) Everyone sits down and looks at the menu for ages, trying to decide what to have. After five minutes the waitress comes over and asks people what they would like to drink, at which point everyone suddenly turns to the drinks listed on the back page of the menu which they haven't thought to look at yet.
3) Anyone requesting a glass of water is presented with a small bottle recently filled from the tap in the kitchen, which is added to the bill at a cost of at least three pounds. Anyone requesting a glass of tap water is sneered at but receives the same drink in a glass at no cost.
4) The background music is turned up slightly too loud for comfort, and consists either of old Westlife tracks on endless loop or something strange and ethnic that the restaurant doesn't have to fork out royalty payments on.
5) When the main course arrives you look down disappointedly at the paltry selection of food dumped on your plate, wondering how the restaurant can charge so much for a meal that is essentially half lettuce. Later, once you've started eating, the people at the table next to you get their main course. At this point you realise you should have chosen what they had.
6) Five minutes into eating your meal, the waitress comes over to ask whether you're enjoying your food. She has been trained to approach the table only at the exact moment when everyone's mouth is full. Therefore everyone just nods and grunts approvingly in her general direction, rather than complaining about the fact that the sauce is cold, the meat is rare, and the meal is half lettuce.
7) The dessert menu, when it arrives, is a tacky laminated sheet full of overpriced ice creams, tarts and mousses, mass-produced in large quantities off-site and piled high in the restaurant's freezer. As a result nobody chooses to have a dessert and instead spends the next few minutes bemoaning the day restaurants stopped serving up decent filling desserts like apple pie, treacle pudding and spotted dick.
8) Despite having made it very clear to the waitress fifteen minutes ago that nobody wanted either a dessert or a coffee, there still seems to be no sign of the bill ever arriving. It's impossible to catch the waitress's eye because she seems to be spending all her time on the other side of the restaurant or sneaking off to hide in the kitchen. In the end she has to be asked three times before she finally remembers how to carry a small piece of paper from the till to your table.
9) When the bill arrives, everyone who spent above the average amount argues that the bill should be split evenly. Meanwhile everyone who spent below the average amount argues that people should each pay their fair share. In the end, everyone realises that they don't in fact have enough spare change to be able to pay the exact amount anyway, so the waitress ends up with a much larger tip than her poor service deserved.
10) I could only come up with nine of these. I'm sure I can rely on you lot to tell me something that I've missed out.
