Talk:Tag:fast food=cafeteria

I don't understand what makes this different from amenity=cafe. Can someone explain please? In my British English understanding of the sentence: "place, where you can quickly have full dinner with second dish and drink" - that's a pretty good description of what I would call a cafe. Please could someone explain the difference? --Danstowell (talk) 08:33, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

A cafe is more just for drinks (the coffee, tea or similar) with something small to eat on the side (salty or sweet), but this seems to describe something more like a lunch restaurant - where you don't have table service - but you'd normally never take a date to a cafeteria (as described here) to eat dinner (like a restaurant would imply), nor would you go specifically to a cafeteria to eat a delicious peace of cake with a latte, even if they happened to have them both available. A cafe hardly sells full lunches, even if they might have something suitable available. There could be better terms available, or are there? Looking at WP the words seem to have all sorts of different connotations around the world. I haven't previously thought about what the tags should be ideally, but there is a difference. Alv (talk) 12:44, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm afraid that in the UK, the term "cafe" covers both: some "cafe"s are primarily for drinking tea/coffee, and some "cafe"s are primarily for eating full lunch. The current description at amenity=cafe does NOT focus only on "drinking" places but describes the range - ...the description was probably written by a British person! Alv, you say you're in Finland, so I guess your description (here in this talk page) reflects the Finnish understanding of the term. As you say, the term has all sorts of different connotations around the world.

OSM tags are intentionally named in British English. Aceman444 (talk) 11:46, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

So the important question (in my opinion) is: is there a country in which both "cafe and "cafeteria" exist, and have different connotations? (If so, then that would provide a motivation for having this separate tag. If not, well, I would still be trying to understand why this tag is proposed, and would be grateful for a more detailed description by someone.) --Danstowell (talk) 14:28, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cafeteria. Yes in many countries cafe and cafeteria exist in parallel and are a quite different type of amenity. The distinction is what Alv has written above. While I have never known that the word "cafeteria" is for this type of amenity, "canteen" is the more recognized term here. Aceman444 (talk) 11:46, 8 April 2017 (UTC)