A café is a type of restaurant which usually serves coffee and snacks. The term "café" comes from French, and means "coffee". A café is sometimes called a coffeehouse or a coffee shop or tea shop in English, a café in French and a bar in Italian. (Cafe/café is the spelling in English, French, Spanish etc. But "caffe" is how the Italian word for coffee is spelled in that language.) It shares some of the characteristics of a bar, and some of the characteristics of a restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria, which is a type of restaurant w