[custom_adv] A coffeehouse, coffee shop or café (sometimes spelled cafe) is an establishment which primarily serves hot coffee, related coffee drinks (café latte, cappuccino, espresso), tea, and other hot drinks. [custom_adv] Some coffeehouses also serve cold drinks such as iced coffee and iced tea. Many cafés also serve some type of food, such as light snacks, muffins or pastries. Coffeehouses range from owner-operated small businesses to large multinational corporations. [custom_adv] In continental Europe, cafés often serve alcoholic drinks and light food, but elsewhere the term "café" may also refer to a teahouse or tea room, "greasy spoon" (a small and inexpensive restaurant, colloquially called a "caff"), transport café, or other casual eating and drinking place. [custom_adv] A coffeehouse may share some of the same characteristics of a bar or restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria. Many coffeehouses in the Middle East and in West Asian immigrant districts in the Western world offer shisha (nargile in Greek and Turkish), flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah. [custom_adv] Espresso bars are a type of coffeehouse that specializes in serving espresso and espresso-based drinks.From a cultural standpoint, coffeehouses largely serve as centers of social interaction: the coffeehouse provides patrons with a place to congregate, talk, read, write, entertain one another, or pass the time, whether individually or in small groups. [custom_adv] Since the development of Wi-Fi, coffeehouses with this capability have also become places for patrons to access the Internet on their laptops and tablet computers. A coffeehouse can serve as an informal club for its regular members. [custom_adv] As early as the 1950s Beatnik era and the 1960s folk music scene, coffeehouses have hosted singer-songwriter performances, typically in the evening. The most common English spelling, café, is the French, Portuguese, and Spanish spelling, and was adopted by English-speaking countries in the late-19th century. [custom_adv] As English generally makes little use of diacritics, anglicisation tends to omit them and to place the onus on the readers to remember how it is pronounced without the presence of the accent. [custom_adv] Thus the spelling cafe has become very common in English-language usage throughout the world, especially for the less formal, i.e., "greasy spoon" variety (although orthographic prescriptivists often disapprove of it). [custom_adv] The Italian spelling, caffè, is also sometimes used in English. In southern England, especially around London in the 1950s, the French pronunciation was often facetiously altered to and spelt caff. [custom_adv] The English words coffee and café derive from the Italian word for coffee, caffè —first attested as caveé in Venice in 1570 —and in turn derived from Arabic qahwa (قهوة). The Arabic term qahwa originally referred to a type of wine, but after the wine ban by Islam, the name was transferred to coffee because of the similar rousing effect it induced. [custom_adv] European knowledge of coffee (the plant, its seeds, and the drink made from the seeds) came through European contact with Turkey, likely via Venetian-Ottoman trade relations.The English word café to describe a restaurant that usually serves coffee and snacks rather than the word coffee that describes the drink, is derived from the French café. The first café is believed to have opened in France in 1660. [custom_adv] The translingual word root /kafe/ appears in many European languages with various naturalized spellings, including; Portuguese, Spanish, and French (café); German (Kaffee); Polish (kawa); Ukrainian (кава, 'kava'); and others. [custom_adv] Coffeehouses in Mecca became a concern of imams who viewed them as places for political gatherings and drinking. They were banned for Muslims between 1512 and 1524. In 1530, the first coffeehouse was opened in Damascus [better source needed] and not long after there were many coffeehouses in Cairo.
