These words all denote places where refreshments or meals are provided for the public. The most widely used term in the group, and the one with the widest range of meaning, is restaurant. A restaurant can be anything from a small counter operation to a very large establishment with several rooms. Restaurants can serve a variety of food or they can specialize in French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, etc., cuisine. Many restaurants have bars or cocktail lounges where it is possible to have a drink before dining. At some restaurants , live music is played by, perhaps, a pianist or a small combination of instruments; indeed, there are restaurants , particularly foreign ones, where singers entertain during dinner hours and later on at night. Restaurants may be open for a relatively short time each day; some serve only breakfast and lunch – others serve lunch and dinner; some serve dinner only, and still others are open for dinner, supper and late evening snacks. Coffee shops and lunch-counters (or snack bars ) are small restaurants which cater to a breakfast, lunch or after theatre trade. They are quick-service eating places with people seated at counters as well as at tables. When a coffee-shop is part of a hotel, the name is used to distinguish it from the more formal and more expensive hotel restaurant called the hotel dining-room .

Café is the French word for coffee-house . Café can retain that meaning and be a small place which serves coffee and other non-alcoholic beverages and simple food such as pastry or sandwiches. More commonly, such an establishment is called a coffee-shop , and occasionally features, in addition to the same kind of refreshments, some kind of entertainment such as poetry readings or folk singing. Café can also designate, as it often does in Europe, an open-air eating and drinking place. In this kind of café it is sometimes possible to get alcoholic as well as non-alcoholic beverage and, if the café is part of a regular restaurant , a full meal.

A cafeteria is a particular kind of restaurant , the distinctive feature of which is the fact that its patrons carry their own food from the counter, where it is served, to the table at which it is eaten. Cafeterias may be open for part of the day or all day.

Eating-house is an informal word for any kind of restaurant . It is sometimes used as part of the name of an eating spot: Mother Hubbard’s Eating-House . It more often appears in the writing of advertisers or columnists who may or may not be intentionally trying to match the informality inherent in the word.

• Melbourne’s newest celebrity hang-out is a posh eating-house in Collins Street.

Greasy spoon is slang. It graphically describes a restaurant whose food is cheap but no bargain and which is often as unsavoury-looking as the name suggests.