The Cheshire Grin Cat Cafe

The Cheshire Grin Cat Cafe is a cat cafe in the proper sense: a 501(c)(3) non-profit animal rescue, with an adoption floor that visitors are invited to sit down in. The cats roam free, the coffee and pastries are secondary, and every animal in the room is looking for a home.

Guests book a place in the cat lounge and pay a small charge to enter, which goes to the rescue. Inside, the arrangement is deliberately unhurried – people sit on the floor or in chairs and let the cats decide whether to be sociable, which is a better test of a match than meeting an animal through the bars of a shelter cage. A good many adoptions have started with somebody who came in for an hour with a coffee and left having filled in paperwork.

There is no kitchen on site, so refreshments come from neighbouring businesses – a sensible arrangement on a street with this much good baking within a few minutes’ walk, and one that keeps money circulating locally.

A few rules keep the room calm: reservations for each person, young children not admitted to the lounge, and older children accompanied. These exist for the animals’ sake rather than the visitors’, and they are worth respecting.

The cafe stands at 1926 Cherokee Street, on the antiques end of the Row, which makes it an easy stop in the middle of an afternoon of shops – and an unusually good one for anyone travelling with someone who has run out of patience for furniture.