How New York favors dogs over cats
Who has more clout in this city — dog people or cat people? Right now, dogs have a leg up on their feline competition.
The K-9 folks won a critical legal victory this year, securing the right to bring their pets to outdoor cafes. But if you want to eat in a restaurant surrounded by strange cats — something that’s perfectly legal in Paris and Tokyo and other global cities — you’re out of luck. New York does have “cat cafes,” as they’re known — but regulates them far too restrictively.
In Paris, you can go to Le Café des Chats, sit down, and have a waiter serve you quiche and hot chocolate while cats roam all around the room, peer at you from a ledge or sit on your lap.
Why would anyone want to do that?
Well, why does anyone want to do anything? People want to do all kinds of strange things. People go to strip clubs, even though a stray breast could fall into their drinks.
And the best way to find the product you’re looking for is to come to a big city. The magic of the free market means that whatever you’re buying, someone is selling.
In New York, however, state and city health regulations prohibit restaurants from preparing or serving food with animals present.
That doesn’t make opening a cat cafe impossible — but it does mean you have to violate the spirit, though not the letter, of the law.
New York’s cat-cafe founders have to be creative.
Christina Ha and Emilie Legrand opened Meow Parlour on the Lower East Side last year. Customers go to the Meow Parlour to hang out with the cats. But the food they eat comes from the co-owners’ entirely separate cafe across the street: the Meow Parlour Patisserie (where you can get a Linzer cookie shaped like a cat).
Meow Parlour customers can order food and drinks to eat among the cats only because the order is like ordering a food delivery to your own house. “The food has to go outside,” says Ha. “It has to leave the food-service establishment. It is literally on a different street.” Ha met with a top city Health Department deputy before opening, and she reads the law carefully every six months.
That’s the case, too, with Erin McShane’s Little Lions cafe — set to open downtown in December. “There’s a slew of things I need to separate,” says McShane, a tech-industry vet who plans to serve food in one space and allow patrons to take that food to a completely separate space so that they can eat and drink with adoptable cats.
Cat-cafe owners aren’t particularly agitating to change the law. Ha notes that “it would be nice if we could be in the same place,” but that having food and cats together would cause insurance problems. She also notes that compared to dealing with food, dealing with animals is easy.
“I have two A grades” at two other bakeries, she says. (Meow Parlour also gets an A.)
McShane says that “for the United States, this is doing something that’s brand-new. I understand the regulation.” She adds, though, that “as time goes on,” people can “figure out the regulations that make the most sense.”
It’s all just a reminder of how hard it is to be a real entrepreneur in New York City — that is, someone who puts her own money and sweat on the line every day, and who doesn’t have the clout to make her own rules, as big startups do.
Cat cafes serve a good cause, too. Meow Parlour has helped 60 foster cats find homes so far. One resident cat, Sergey, is having a leg amputated this week, to ease pain from an old injury.
Little Lions, McShane says, can help cats that otherwise might be put to death by putting them in an environment that isn’t a cage in an animal shelter — where many cats will just cower in a corner and be ignored by potential families.
Cat cafes, too, can be a place where people who aren’t ready to adopt a pet can come and enjoy animals, rather than make a commitment they can’t keep.
In New York, smart people — and cats — will find a way. But Albany and Gotham could make life easier. After all, says McShane, “people are coming of their own free will.”
This piece originally appeared in New York Post