Cat Cafes of America

For the last year of my twitter usage before I abandoned it entirely, I followed no one and only read feeds via twitter lists to avoid cluttering my feed with other people’s arguments (partially successful). It also forced me to organize my social media usage into topics of interest, and turns out my favorite list was of cat cafes and one of my favorite twitter activities was adding cat cafes to the list.

Cat cafes originated in Asia (popular in Taiwan and Japan) as a way for apartment dwellers to get some quality time with pets. In the U.S., they’re typically a mechanism for getting shelter cats adopted, with customers paying either a visiting fee or purchasing food and drinks and then hanging out with the cats. Here I’ll list the ones I can remember, in the hopes of one day doing a cross country tour of cat cafes:

The first cat cafe I ever encountered is The Cat Cafe in downtown San Diego, which I visited weekly, often multiple times per week.

So when I moved to Las Vegas, I was excited by the plans for the Meow or Never cat cafe in downtown Las Vegas, but it seemed to have run out of steam while they were fixing up the building and all that remains is the mural above.

However, along came another cat cafe in the Las Vegas area (technically, North Las Vegas) called Rescued Treasures. It’s basically an office of a cat rescue and is open to the public for $10/hr.

Those are the only two I’ve been to, and I recommend both of them, they’re run by cat people and do good work in getting cats adopted. Here are some of the others I found on twitter:

MAUHAUS Cat Cafe and Lounge in the St. Louis, Missouri area is my favorite cat cafe name.

The Pawfee Shop in Appleton, Wisconsin is a recent find and also gets points for its name.

Mew Haven Cat Cafe is, of course, in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Brooklyn Cat Cafe is temporarily closed for the pandemic.

Purrington’s Cat Lounge in Portland, Oregon, was opened and closed and sold and opened and also currently closed for the pandemic. Tough business.

And on one of my recent coffee runs, the barista mentioned Tinker’s Cat Cafe in Salt Lake City. It’s fitting that I heard about a new cat cafe in a cafe.