Talk:Coffeehouse

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

More information Related taskforces:, Food and Drink task list: ...
Close

Canadian usage

While café may refer to a coffeehouse, the term "café" generally refers to a diner, British café (colloquially called a "caff"), "greasy spoon" (a small and inexpensive restaurant), transport café, teahouse or tea room, or other casual eating and drinking place.

I've resided in BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia, and it seems to me that "coffeehouse" is almost never used, "coffee shop" is used quite a lot (sometimes generically), while "café" hardly ever substitutes for cafeteria or greasy spoon or teahouse (I think there are more patisseries in Vancouver than greasy spoons to begin with, which are anyway more commonly called "family restaurants" or "diners" or "truck stops" as the case may be, or simply "Tim's" or "Starbucks").

If I was planning to meet someone in a tearoom, I would try hard not to call it a café, but if I were asked "where have you been all day?" I might say "I was hanging out at the café" irrespective of the beverages served. Then it would go, "What café?" and I would say "The Blethering Place" and it would go, "Oh, you mean the tearoom!" So far as it exists, the lazy, generic use of "café" does not much hold up under scrutiny in Canadian English as I have experienced this.

That there's a large Francophone population embedded among the Anglophones probably helps to police matters.

Sometimes "café" is used for coffee shops where the coffee is incidental, and the pastries you consume with your hot beverage are the main focus. Such an establishment almost certainly lacks a deep fryer, and only serves pre-prepared sandwiches, at most passed through a microwave oven or—luxury edition—an actual panini press.

There may also be some cases where the cafe is integrated into frontage of an office facility where it's too upscale to refer to as a cafeteria, and then the local inhabitants of the building fall into using "the cafe" regardless of what it really serves.

FWIW, I don't think the paragraph in Wikipedia accurately reflects Canadian usage. — MaxEnt 04:36, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Here in Netherlands it is even more complex. Café here is more what in english is called pub or bar. Where beer is the main concentration and coffee also incidently in more daytime. The english term coffeeshop we use too, but is here a place where, coffee is a secondary item, where the main sales lay in, yeah, that where NL is known for to have. 2001:1C03:4918:A100:9DED:27CA:62FE:FF6 (talk) 17:58, 25 June 2023 (UTC)
MaxEnt, natural languages have many synonyms, but few long retain absolutely identical meanings and nuances. (Begin and start are synonyms, but I wouldn't talk of "beginning" a car.) Cafés (or whatever name one gives to places that emphasize the serving of coffee) also feel pressed to distinguish themselves, and so may make calculated choices among the available synonyms or on occasion even coin a new one. Trendy words become tired, then unfashionable, and later still have a "retro" appeal. Et cetera. All in all I think it's best to say that coffeehouse (or whatever is the title of the article) is merely one among a number of alternatives (café, coffee shop, etc), among which pairs have at certain times and in certain places been interchangeable but otherwise may have diverged quite widely. The article could distinguish among the terms where not doing so would risk confusion; but I don't think it should attempt lexicographical work for which Wiktionary would be more appropriate. -- Hoary (talk) 01:57, 6 January 2026 (UTC)

'Coffeehouse' - first time in English

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it seems that the term 'coffee-house' was first used in 1615 by George Sandys, who noticed these establishments in Istanbul. "Wine is prohibited them by their Alcoran... Although they be destitute of Taverns, yet have they their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There sit they chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drinke called Coffa (of the berry that it is made of) in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it: blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike." (A relation of a journey begun An: Dom: 1610, 1621 ed., p.66). Drz (talk) 19:06, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Drz, the first use of the word "coffeehouse" seems only mildly interesting (after all, this is not a dictionary but an encyclopedia); but surely the coverage in this article of Ottoman and Near East history could and should be improved. The article Coffeehouses in Arabic culture cites Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East; but this article does not. I'm surprised to find that the book is freely available from archive.org (I mean, as if it had been published a century earlier); it could be a very useful resource for you. So go ahead! -- Hoary (talk) 00:46, 6 January 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: English 111 First-Semester College Composition Online

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 January 2025 and 3 May 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Bell259 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Gnonne.

— Assignment last updated by Lincol7 (talk) 22:54, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Bell259, you don't seem to have edited the article at all, instead writing in User:Bell259/Coffeehouse and User:Bell259/Coffeehouse/Bibliography. Perhaps you or Lincol7 would care to comment. -- Hoary (talk) 23:43, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

Third Place

How have coffeehouses, despite originating in different countries, served a similar social purpose as a "third place" where people gather, connect, and engage with their communities. Bell259 (talk) 03:14, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I infer that this was the question to which a response, Bell259, was your course assignment. -- Hoary (talk) 23:43, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

"a well-known engraving of a Parisian café"

Added in this edit by Wetman of 20 February 2004: In a well-known engraving of a Parisian coffeehouse of ca 1700....

By 30 December 2025, this had become: In a well-known engraving of a Parisian café c. 1700,[1]...

The somewhat small and fuzzy JPEG of an engraving uploaded to Geocities fits the 2004 description and is the same as that in File:17th century coffeehouse england 1-580x400.jpg -- a strange filename indeed for an engraving of a Parisian café.

I investigated. That the engraving shows a Parisian café is a reasonable inference (I made it myself), but mistaken: see its talk page at Commons if interested. For this article, I've changed the description from "Parisian" to "English". -- Hoary (talk) 11:40, 5 January 2026 (UTC) Minor rewording Hoary (talk) 23:30, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

References

  1. [1]
    "A coffeehouse at the close of the seventeenth century". Archived from the original on 19 October 2009.

From the engraving back to the drawing – and its orientation

We can avoid the risk that what's depicted in File:17th century coffeehouse england 1-580x400.jpg is some kind of mongrel of the English and the Parisian (see the thread immediately above) if we substitute for this engraving the drawing from which it derives.
I was happy to discover that Commons already had this. And so a few minutes ago I made the substitution.

Note that in the drawing the barista is on the left. And that in both the British Museum page showing and describing the drawing and in Drawing in England from Hilliard to Hogarth (plate 181) too, she's on the left.

The proximate source of File:Interior_of_a_London_Coffee-house,_17th_centuryFXD.jpg is the somewhat luridly coloured File:Interior of a London Coffee-house, 17th century.JPG. This specifies as its source what survives as "Witness the following description of an 18th Century coffeehouse", a page by a University of Toronto grad student, Sarah Amato. This in turn cites Pim Reinders, Thera Wijsenbeek et al., Koffie in Nederland: Viereeuwen culturgeschiendenis, (Zutphen: Walberg Pers; Deft: Gemeente Musea Delft, 1994), 40. WorldCat (OCLC 31711084) shows that this is ISBN 9789060118771 (and differs over some of the bibliographical details). I haven't been able to see this book and so don't know who's responsible, but Amato presents the drawing flipped left to right (barista on the right). So the kind uploader to Commons must then have un-flipped it for accuracy.

Compared with what we see in the British Museum page for the drawing and in Drawing in England from Hilliard to Hogarth, the drawing has been cropped, particularly along the top. But the cropping doesn't seem important for its use in this article (or indeed for any Wikipedia use that I can easily imagine). -- Hoary (talk) 23:30, 5 January 2026 (UTC) (Pinging SimmeD and Hjart.)

Gender

As for the brief word within the article about "gender" (whose imbalance the drawing discussed immediately above is supposed to illustrate), there's interesting comment in this very old thread within "Archive 1". -- Hoary (talk) 01:01, 6 January 2026 (UTC)

Coffee: A Dark History

@Hoary: https://archive.org/details/coffeedarkhistor0000wild/page/90 from the 2005 US edition is not available, but https://archive.org/details/coffeedarkhistor0000wild_n9a5/page/90 from the 2004 UK edition is. Oddly Coffee: A Dark History only mentions the 2005 edition. TSventon (talk) 23:51, 7 January 2026 (UTC)

Well spotted, TSventon. (And I never would have imagined that there'd be an article here about the book.) Now implemented. As you may have noticed, I'm plodding through the article, not seeing the wood for the trees -- no, not seeing the trees for the twigs. But really, this article needs a top-down revision more acutely than it needs the bottom-up fiddling that I'm doing. I don't think that the reshuffle of its contents that I did a week ago damaged it; but it needs something more radical and I don't quite know what. Perhaps "History of coffeehouses" should be spun off, so that the ahistorical remainder may eventually be augmented to cover today's cafés of Japan, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Barbados, etc. -- Hoary (talk) 23:46, 8 January 2026 (UTC)
@Hoary: I am probably mostly happy with working with details. I agree that the history of coffeehouses in Europe could be spun out, but am dubious about more country by country detail.
Another detailed comment: I believe that A Coffee House Manual exists and is available on Amazon with a review from Tim Schulz. It doesn't seem to be an independent source. That led me to Cafe church, possibly the most random collection of information I have read for a while. TSventon (talk) 04:26, 9 January 2026 (UTC)
TSventon, if your preference for detail leads you to suspicions such as that an unidentified evaluation is actually a review for Amazon ... then please keep on with the detail! (I've just now deleted mention of this obscure book.) On the country-by-country detail: I've no intention of adding more of it; however, I think it is (or could and should be) encyclopedic. I'm rather wary of "oldest coffeehouse in [city/country]" as this -- and even more so, "oldest coffeehouse in [city/country] that's still operating" -- tends to be little more than material created for the impressionable tourist. Most of the related articles are feeble. The article Caffè Florian doesn't specify a source for the opening date; it:Caffè Florian does, and it's ... Caffè Florian itself. Et cetera. -- Hoary (talk) 08:11, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

Referencing system

This long article (which promises/threatens to become still longer) currently makes no use of the Sfn, Sfnp, or even Rp template.

The result is that named references reduce bulk only if the subsequent reference is (or references are) to the same exact page. For example,

Molmenti, Pompeo (1908). Venice: Its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic. Translated by Brown, Horatio F. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. Part 3, The Decadence. Vol. 1, p. 175. OCLC 732256519 – via Internet Archive.

can't be reused other than for a second reference to part 3 (The Decadence), volume 1, page 175 of this very bulky work. Thus the very next reference is to:

Molmenti, Pompeo (1908). Venice: Its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the Republic. Translated by Brown, Horatio F. Chicago: A. C. McClurg. Part 3, The Decadence. Vol. 1, p. 176, n. 1. OCLC 732256519 – via Internet Archive.

This is silly. It bulks up the page for the reader and makes things more difficult for the editor.

I suggest that Template:Rp is used where it would be helpful, but I'm very open to alternative suggestions. (TSventon, Ceoil, anybody?) -- Hoary (talk) 23:55, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

Snf for me, but really anything that isn't cite ref; am currently reviewing an article that uses the template; making preview a HTML nightmare. Ceoil (talk) 00:22, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
To note: am replying because was pinged, don't have an opinion on the article itself. Ceoil (talk) 00:26, 10 January 2026 (UTC)
Ceoil, I pinged you as you seem to have strong opinions on matters of referencing style. My own are: (i) the present state is silly; (ii) I've already spent hours converting this article from truly terrible to slightly less terrible and I don't want to spend hours more converting from one referencing system to another. A minor (or automatable) conversion is much more attractive. When you say "cite ref" and point me to Meg White you can only mean <ref name="whatever">{{cite variety | blah=blah blah}}</ref> (i.e. what's used now). I'm up to converting half a dozen or so of these "by hand"; but a hundred of the damn things, no. Has some kind person developed a tool that will automate conversion of this stuff to Template:Sfnp or whatever? -- Hoary (talk) 11:35, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Spelling, etc; dates

The spelling in this article -- quotations aside, of course -- seems to vary between American and British. The dates seem more DMY than MDY.

How about standardizing on "Oxford English" spelling and DMY? (Again, quotations aside, of course.) -- Hoary (talk) 12:06, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Well it should be one or the other. I'd prefer BritEng/DMY of course, but up to you really. Ceoil (talk) 21:21, 12 January 2026 (UTC)
Thanks, Ceoil. Since "Oxford English" (i) is British,* (ii) perhaps doesn't look as odd to Americans as the other British kind-of-system with "realise", "realisation", etc, and (iii) happens to come rather easily to me, I'll start standardizing to it some time in the next few days. And I'll start standardizing to DMY too. Unless there are objections before then. Not touching quotes, of course. * The Briticizing is for you, Ceoil. Me, I'm "agnostic" on this trivial matter. -- Hoary (talk) 04:17, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

"Further reading"

I'm about to delete the section "Further reading", which contained:

This article already has so many references (many with links) that a "Further reading" section (mostly without) does not strike me as useful -- other perhaps than to editors and potential editors, who may read it here. -- Hoary (talk) 04:18, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Oh god trim please. Ceoil (talk) 04:20, 13 January 2026 (UTC)
Done already! -- Hoary (talk) 05:26, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

"grammar mistakes"

456jabar, your summary for this edit of yours was "grammar mistakes". Presumably this was shorthand not for "making grammar mistakes" but instead for "fixing grammar mistakes". In this edit, you make half a dozen discrete changes. Please choose any one of these changes, and explain how it fixed a grammar mistake.

The reason I ask is that I don't see that you fixed a single grammar mistake. And the matter of grammar aside, you don't even seem to have made any improvement. (As an example, changing "drinks" to "beverages" is no grammatical or semantic change; it merely adds pomposity.) -- Hoary (talk) 04:50, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

No response, so I reverted the edit. -- Hoary (talk) 22:43, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Related Articles

Wikiwand AI