frisky business cat cafés pounce on new markets BY LEAH SMITH
THE CATS MAKE the rules here. Signs at
the front prohibit patrons from feeding the residents or disturbing them with flash photography. An ominous placard reads “pet at your own risk.” The space is cozy, stuffed with bean bag chairs and scratching posts—but cats have already claimed most of the available spots. The shelves are stocked with board games: Herding Cats, Feed the Kitty, and Cat-opoly. Since Oakland Cat Town launched in 2014, cat cafes have cropped up across the U.S. New Haven’s first cat cafe, Mew Haven, experimented with a pop-up for several weeks in
November and December of 2017, and will open for good in the spring, at a date yet to be determined. The concept is straightforward: Most cafes charge five to ten dollars for an hour-long reservation, plus the cost of food and drink purchased by visitors. Many cat cafe founders are patrons of existing cafes inspired to strike out on their own. Angela Pullo and her husband, the co-founders of Mew Haven, visited their first cat cafe in New York City in 2015, after their own cat died. “We kept visiting cat cafes until we decided to open one,” she said, “but we knew if we were going to do it, we
couldn’t do it in New York—the rent is astronomical.” The couple spent two years researching and then moved to New Haven in August 2017. Cam Tucker, founder of Baltimore’s Charm Kitty Cafe, first visited a cat cafe in Vienna, Austria. “It was unlike anything I had ever done,” he said, “as a cat person, it was exciting.” A few years later he visited Crumbs and Whiskers, a large cat cafe in Washington, D.C., and was inspired to bring the idea to Baltimore. “I started to think, why can’t Baltimore have our own cat cafe?” Tucker explained. 29
