In England, it’s usually pronounced with the long ‘A’ at the end. But frequently written without the accent.
I’ve heard cafe pronounced as the first syllable of cafeteria…
I’ve only heard cafe pronounced Cah-FAY’. Same as café.
Have you heard people saying CAFF?
Really?
(We used to call our school cafeteria “The Caff”, but that was a pejorative, and always said half-jokingly.)
I can’t remember where I heard the unaccented pronunciation. I think it was on a British drama.
That’s actually “Coffee”; the rest is hiding behind the banner.
For me, cafe a cafe is a place where the primary product is coffee and that have decent seating to stay for a spell. They will offer light food options, more often breakfast options, but almost nothing that requires a knife and fork. Better ones offer table service but that isn’t required to meet my definition. Friends and Frasier both had classic cafes. These are pretty close to the European cafe model but US cafes don’t necessarily have table service. In my area, the local cafes are about 50/50 on whether they offer table service.
A coffee shop is a place where the primary product is coffee but decent seating isn’t required. Thus all cafes are coffee shops but not all coffee shops are cafes. Dunkin and Tim Hortons are coffee shops.
A coffeehouse is where you get pot in Amsterdam.
A diner is a very casual restaurant that has table service and probably offers little or no takeout service. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner with a wide menu, including many things that require a knife and fork. Food is always served by a server, whether at the table or counter. Seinfeld featured a classic diner.
Definitely Starbucks is the “main cafe” near me. Four within one mile. In the same radius, there is one Dunkin’ and I’m guessing five or six local independent cafes.
There’s a Panera near me too. To me, Panera emphasizes food and isn’t a coffee shop. If I had to categorize Panera, I would call it a “lunch place.” That is, a casual dining place with better-than-fast food and no table service. Panera made a play to capture some of the coffee market with an all-you-can-drink card some time ago but I don’t know if it stuck.
The same. (Two syllables) I’m just too lazy to figure out how to type it out the second way.
ALT+0233.
To me, those are donut shops that sell coffee. Dunkin’ only branded itself “America’s Coffee Shop” when it decided to directly compete with Starbucks.
I’ve been relying on the squiggly line under the unaccented word and using the right mouse button for the correction.
It sounds to me like this usage varies regionally. To me, it most definitely does not imply food made to order. That’s getting into the diner space. For me and my peers, having worked in a cafe/coffee shop for years, they are exactly synonymous. “Coffeeshop” is just an Anglicized way of saying café around here.
I’m sure part of it is that rents were lower - but there are also parts of the city that are pretty much deserted after the workers go home , where it doesn’t make sense to keep a restaurant open. The people I bought my house from had a coffee shop in an area where their business came from the courthouses and some government offices. There were few residential buildings and no real shopping, or movie theatres etc. and They closed at around 2 pm, when the courthouse lunch hour was over. There used to be more of those areas than there are now.
I’m in California. I’ve always considered coffee shop and diner almost synonymous, the former being a term mostly coming out of the mouths of my grandparents (who grew up back East, actually).
That’s fair. But if I were somewhere unfamiliar and asked for the closest coffee shop, I would be entirely unsurprised if someone directed me to Dunkin’ or Tim Hortons.
Twenty years ago people called the cafeteria at work “the caff” but I haven’t heard that in many years.
This is the Boston area, where some of the idiosyncratic usages I found when I moved here are fading out. I haven’t heard “water bubbler” in ages as well.
Biggby Coffee is a “coffeehouse” that started in Michigan. They have about 400 locations.
When I was hitchhiking around the UK many, many years ago, I fell in love with transport cafés. They always had good grub, though I don’t recall any of them offering Spam. 
In the US, they’re called “truck stops.” The really good ones have showers and TV lounges for truckers. I used to crash in them when hitchhiking on the Interstate, and nobody ever raised an eyebrow. One of the best meals I ever had was at a truck stop in Wisconsin in the dead of winter: a bottomless cup of hot black coffee and a platter of buttermilk biscuits smothered in butter and sausage gravy, all for less than $2.00. (This was back around 1984.) I devoured that like it was ambrosia! 
YouTube has a bunch of long clips with no commentary showing how breakfasts are prepared at transport cafes in the UK. Last week I watched one that was more than an hour long, and I was never bored!
One of my lasting regrets is that I never had the opportunity to dine at an automat. I believe the coffee was the only thing not behind glass. Did you have to plunk a nickel in a slot to get the cup to pour it in or something?
I did eat at an Automat, around 1987, during a week at a college journalism convention. And while we were sitting there eating, I saw a motor coach pull up and discharge an entire busload of Japanese Century 21 real estate agents (with the gold sportcoats that were characteristic of that agency) and cameras around their necks (as per the stereotype of Japanese tourists). I was amused that they were there for the same reason we were; to enjoy this classic New York experience.
I remember eating at an Automat in NYC when my dad, brother, and I were there for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. It was a real treat to put your coins in the slots and take whatever you wanted from behind the windows.
Of course, I wasn’t drinking coffee in 1964, but from what I’ve seen in old films, it was prepared in giant urns. I believe you paid a cashier for a mug and were then allowed to fill it yourself as many times as you wanted.
To me a “coffee shop” has no inherent meaning other than “a place that sells coffee.” It’s pretty much interchangeable with “café.” If it’s an actual restaurant that serves food and has booths, that’s a diner.