A coffee shop is not a coffee house. The terms are conflated in the Starbucks era, but there is scant synonymity. A coffee house, like Starbucks, is all about the coffee, including a catalog of fancy espresso drinks at dollar-per-ounce prices (see coffee talk). A coffee shop rarely offers more than regular and decaf, and the waitress will keep pouring as long as you keep drinking. Coffee house food is pastries and prefab sandwiches heated in the microwave. Coffee shops serve great platters of breakfast, hot lunch with gravy and double-decker sandwiches, pie and pudding for dessert, and maybe even dinner, too. In a coffee house, one can sit with a laptop in an easy chair and connect to the Internet. In a coffee shop, you sit at the counter, or maybe in a booth, and connect with human beings: your dining companion, the waitress or short-order cook, or perfect strangers sitting nearby.
The coffee shop is the diner’s more respectable cousin, offering a similarly broad menu but on nicer plates with sprigs of parsley. Most coffee shops are urban—oases for shoppers or business folks in need of decent food at a fair price with no folderol or wasted time. They reached their apotheosis in the mid-twentieth century in southern California, where the most glorious of them still thrive: places like Pann’s in Los Angeles, with its dramatic “googie” décor, like a tailfinned Cadillac mated with a spaceship, and Hob Nob Hill in San Diego, where the staff are as efficient as nurses in an operating theater. However stylish, polite, and efficient they may be, coffee shops never are pretentious. Come as you are, no reservations required, eat well and pay little, and walk out with spring in your step.
Hathaway’s Coffee Shop, Cincinnati, Ohio.