Every restaurant has a sucker table. It is the worst table in the house, the one where the all the suckers sit. 'Come with me, please,' says Miss Receptionist, as she checks you over on her internal sucker-o-meter for incipient signs of poverty, stupidity and generally being a nobody. If you tick all her boxes, and most of us do, she will then tuck the menus under her arm and sprint across the restaurant with you at her heels. Straight to the sucker table. 'Enjoy your meal!' she will cry, then retreat into the kitchen to scream with laughter and high five the chef. 'Sold it,' she will cry, before collecting all uneaten bread in the returned baskets, piling it on a fresh plate and delivering it straight to you.

The first step in avoiding the sucker table is knowing how to identify it in the first place. If it is next to the loos, on a flight path of waiter traffic or has a bucket placed in the centre collecting brackish fluid dripping from the ceiling, then it is fairly evident you are onto a dud. Yet other signs of impending dining doom are not so obvious. Look around you. Take a moment to take stock. Is there a speaker hanging above the table? Will you have to peer around a steel column to speak to each other? Is it draughty, ill-situated, an afterthought in a corridor, too small or too cramped, a bit damp, dingy and mingy? Is it next to a table laid up for 20, adjacent to a cutlery serving station or in an anteroom next to a pile of beer crates? Are you in the corner, facing the wall, wearing a conical cap with a D embellished on the front? If the answer to any or all of these questions is yes, then you are in trouble.

I should know. Bad tables are one of my specialist subjects. A daft-looking, roly-poly old bird like me is prime sucker-table fodder. They take one look at my Eazi-Squeezi lunching trousers and think; let's get that freak behind a pillar before she puts Alan Yentob off his tian of Dorset crab with smoked avocado purée.

Six years of anonymous restaurant reviewing all over the UK had me staring at more grotty air-conditioning grilles and blank walls than a Parkhurst lifer. And the further problem is that once they stick you in Siberia, they then feel duty bound to ignore your preposterous requests for drinks and hot food for the rest of the evening. Bad service always follows a bad table, like seagulls trailing after a sludge boat. It is a given that the worst waiters will always service the worst spot. So it is vitally important to avoid the sucker table at all costs.

Firstly, don't ever say 'can I have a nice table, please?' when you book over the telephone. Are you crazy? That just annoys them. It will also guarantee you a standard, gritted-teeth response along the lines of we'll do our best/I can't promise anything. This is restaurant-speak for we'll do our best to wreck your evening, your outfit, your confidence and your marriage, too, given half a chance. Or, I can't promise anything except hot soup in your lap and a view of the urinals for your lovely wife.

Note that restaurants will generally try to sell the worst table first. Early birds are always in the firing line, but the availability of so many tables as the session begins gives you a raft of options.

Take a good look at the room and if you are not delighted with the position they have chosen for you, ask to be moved, giving the reason why. Don't sit down, don't allow yourself to be rushed and above all be firm; otherwise you'll get pushed around. But be reasonable, too. It is unfair to ask for the lovely booth for eight in the corner if there is just the two of you, unless you happen to be pathologically self-important, as selfish as a stuck pig, Michael Winner or all of the above.

If the sucker table really is all that's on offer, you always have the option of walking out; a prospect that restaurants fear more and more as the credit crunch hits.

If a good table is paramount, consider a hotel restaurant. What some of them may lack in atmosphere, they make up for in terms of space and comfort.

In general, when booking order a cake, make a special wine request - anything that makes a bigger footprint in the reservations book is always good. If you are truly desperate, turn up at the restaurant with a crutch, and I don't mean an emotional one. Broken bones always guarantee more space, even if that might be one hobbled step too far.

Three restaurants without sucker tables

Saf
152 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London EC2
020 7613 0007

London's first gourmet raw vegan restaurant, complete with botanical cocktails and organic wines. The cheese is made from nut milk, the tap water is ionised and there's barely a carb in sight. A communal table in the middle of the room eases any table anxiety.

The Ritz Restaurant
The Ritz, Piccadilly, London W1
020 7493 8181

One of the loveliest dining rooms in the world, the restaurant at the Ritz has space to spare and not a sucker table in sight. Head chef Frederick Forster creates top-class dishes with the very best ingredients. High on wow factor, but delivers what it promises.

No Sixteen
16 Byres Road, Glasgow
0141 339 2544

A tiny, wee restaurant with about five tables; all as ramshackle as the rest. Equality rules among the battered green leather chairs and junkshop furniture at this Glasgow favourite. Friendly, with fresh, good food, nicely cooked.

· These restaurants and hundreds more are on Jan's restaurant website areyoureadytoorder.co.uk