So here's the thing - I recently went out for a meal with three other people and assumed that at the end of it we would just pay for whatever it was that each person had. To my surprise, two other people at the table assumed we would just split the bill four ways and each pay equal parts of it. They also said my approach was "petty" and supposedly not really the way things are done in the UK. Now, being an immigrant, I'm happy to accept that some assumptions I make stem from experiences I had outside this country, but this particular issue really stumped me so I wanted to get some form of confirmation from you guys. Is it really so common to settle the bill in a restaurant by splitting it into equal parts, even if people had different things? And is it really so "un-British" to not want to do that? Of course, I appreciate it can vary depending on whether the meal was formal or work-related, and also depending on the number of people (obviously, calculating what each person had when you have a table of 15 is ridiculous), but that's why I described my specific example - four people in an informal setting.

tl;dr - I was told the "British thing to do" is to split a bill equally between however many people had a meal no matter what each of them ordered. Is this really the go-to method for you?