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It means a relatively small and informal restaurant that, presumably serves coffee.

In NA if the establishment has an accent in it, it probably has more pretensions, if not, the coffee is probably weaker.

Now, is a cafe an accentless caf or an abbreviated cafeteria If it serves 153 varieties of coffee, it is probably the former; If its customers refer to it as the caif or the caff, the latter.

You take your tray along the line and take or are given food and drink.

It would not be entirely illogical to say a cafeteria style cafecoffee shop (though how that would differ from just a cafeteria isnt clear).

Most cafes just serve coffee (one sort, plus, maybe, decaf for wusses).

If you were to ask what sorts of coffee they sell, you would be directed to the Starbucks down the street (for which the term cafe would probably not be applied, interestingly MS Word just automatically added the accent to cafe).

Caif or caff is not a term I have ever heard in NA (oddly, North Americans seem to shorten words less the either Brits or, especially, AussiesKiwis), though if I did, I would know that it referred to a cafeteria in the NA sense.

Its a word I rarely write, but accents are generally awkward on English keyboards, so I only use them when absolutely necessary; cafe does not fall under this category of words When I was young, I pronounced cafe as caffy (another variation of caff and caif), but I do now say caf.

I agree with this.

It sounds like a 60s or 70s word to me, and I dont hear it much these days, except perhaps in the sense of a dining room in a place of work, a department store, museum, hospital, etc.

At the end of the line, they pay a cashier for the food on their tray.

Cafeterias are associated with institutions such as schools, or organizations such as corporations.

A With The Accent Mark