Coffee shops, cafes and restaurants

On the last night of our short break in Florence last year we had dinner in the hotel restaurant because it was a Sunday and options outside were limited. Fortunately it was a very good hotel with a ‘proper’ restaurant and we were expertly looked after by Markus.

I grumbled when Markus came to take our drinks order that the only beer was Peroni. Why, I asked, could I get a good local beer at Ciabatini, where we’d eaten on the first night, but not in the hotel.

Markus set me right. Ciabatini he explained is a trattoria. It serves local beers and house wines. We are a restaurant, he said, we don’t really serve beer and all the wines we sell are good wines. So I ordered a Negroni and enjoyed my meal with an excellent glass of Chianti Classico.

So in Italy there are rules. Maybe we need similar here because I’m increasingly finding that what some places offer is not what I expect and that’s a recipe for disappointment.

Coffee shops should be simple establishments with a core business of selling coffee and other hot beverages. These drinks are ordered at the counter and taken to the table by the customer. There are no constraints on where you can and cannot sit and if you need to you can move the tables around. You certainly can’t reserve a table and although you might linger over your drink you should not abuse this privilege. Coffee shops may also offer a range of pastries but nothing which involves more than a minimum of post order processing. Simple and go no further than Dulcedo Social in Eddington to see this in action.

The more ambitious coffee shops of course do a little more and that’s when they become cafes. They have a menu of dishes which are prepared to order and that’s when they become cafes. Customers still order at the counter but then their orders might be delivered by serving staff. They can still choose their own tables but to make it practical to match orders to customers it’s best that these do not move around. In order to make money from their kitchens such establishments like their customers to move on once they’ve finished eating. The outdoor service at Stir in Histon is a good example of how this works.

You start to get problems when cafes decide to organise their customers. They get them to sit at a table first and then wait for a server to come and take their orders. Sometimes they might even decide to dictate where their customers should sit and allow tables to be reserved. Such cafes think they’re restaurants and you get the feeling they’re focussing more on themselves and less on their customers. I don’t really want to go to a restaurant for my morning coffee.

Restaurants are different. You go to a restaurant because of the food and you expect them to operate in a manner which makes it easy for you to enjoy it. It still means speed and efficiency but it also means space and time. Eating in a restaurant is not a quickly in and out job and enjoying the familiar. It’s an experience which gets enhanced by making a reservation, being served and enjoying food and drink which you wouldn’t get at home.

In any transaction the two sides get most satisfaction if they have similar expectation so when I go to an establishment for a coffee I’m generally happiest when it regards itself as a coffee shop. I’m less happy when it has pretentions to be something else.

I asked ChatGPT what it thought about the issue. I’m pleased that it largely agreed with me.

Feature	Coffee Shop	Café	Restaurant
Main purpose	Drinks & snacks	Light meals & drinks	Full meals
Ordering	Counter	Counter or table	Table
Stay & linger?	Yes	Maybe1	No2
Meal options	Limited	Light	Full (starters to dessert)
Price range	Lower	Low to mid	Mid to high

¹ at mealtimes no, otherwise yes
² sadly no but restaurant economics dictate the need to move people on