Cafeteria
food service location in which there is little or no waiting staff table service
A cafeteria, sometimes called a canteen outside North America, is a type of food service location in which there is no waiting staff table service. Cafeterias are different from coffeehouses, although the English term came from the Spanish term cafetería, which carries the same meaning.
Instead of table service, there are food-serving counters/stalls, or booths, either in a line or allowing free movement. Customers take the food that they desire as they walk along, placing it on a tray. In addition, there are often stations where customers order food, particularly items such as hamburgers or tacos.
Customers are either charged a flat rate for admission (as in a buffet) or pay at check-out for each item. Some self-service cafeterias charge by the weight of items on a customer's plate. In universities and colleges, some students pay by making a single large payment for the entire academic term.
Food service management companies
Because cafeterias require few employees, they are often found within larger institutions, catering to the employees or clientele of those institutions. Schools, residence halls, hospitals, military bases, prisons, factories, and office buildings often have cafeterias.
The public source identifies “Cafeteria” as food service location in which there is little or no waiting staff table service. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cafeteria, food and service.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8463304. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cafeteria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.