Purrfect

Your Server for Tonight Will Have Hairballs: Cat Cafés Get Popular

“Let’s see now, who ordered the deluxe?” Photo: iStockphoto

A young Boston entrepreneur is “very serious” about her plan to open America’s first cat café, which she hopes to call Miaou Boston. The café — think coffeeshop meets cat-lady living room — will offer sad souls whose landlords don’t allow pets the chance to get their robusto and sphynx fixes in one convenient place, while also acting as a temporary shelter for toms and tabbies. We’d like to think it’ll take just a few cutesy-kittens-in-coffee-mugs photos to fund the impending Kickstarter campaign, provided she can get the Health Department onboard.

Apparently Miaou Boston’s aspirations are only part of what turns out to be a rapidly shedding trend: Londoners will soon be able to frequent Dinah’s Cat Emporium, and Paris’s Café des Chats has quickly turned reservation-only after being open less than a week. The café was forced to turn down cat people who came from all over France for the chance to commingle with strays over croissants, and is now booked through November. (Take that, Gordon Ramsay.) According to the owner of the Parisian enterprise, feline healing powers know no bounds and border on the miraculuous, making a cat café a veritable public health service: “Purring produces vibrations which heal, which relieve arthritis and rheumatism, which lower your blood pressure and your heartbeat.” Other than actually being able to cook you dinner, what can’t cats do?

How purrfect: Boston might get a cat cafe
[Boston.com]
Parisian cat cafe offers “purr therapy” to animal-lovers [Reuters]

Your Server for Tonight Will Have Hairballs: Cat Cafés Get Popular