Cat lovers will soon have a place in South City to enjoy a coffee and snacks while mingling with cats: The Cheshire Grin Cat Cafe, slated to open August 3 at 1926 Cherokee.
The café is the brainchild of partners Paul Scimone and Kateri Cotter, whose animal rescue work led them to open the café. “We’re not a restaurant but an adoption facility with a mini-cafe,” says Cotter, explaining that there’s no kitchen at the facility, so they’ll be partnering with other businesses to bring in the goodies.
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In addition to a full menu of coffees, espressos, and teas, the café will offer a limited menu of snacks and sweets, including the house specialty Pink Panther cake, a bright-pink cake made of white chocolate with raspberry buttercream fillings and frosting.
The café and adoption facility is many years in the making. Fifteen years ago, Scimone was living in Soulard and managing a jazz club when he saw a puppy get hit by a car. “I brought it to Stray Rescue,” he recalls. “Once there, I saw they needed help, so I volunteered. My work was basically a night job, so during the day, I worked with the animals.” He eventually became the rescue’s registered dog trainer and, eventually, director of training and rescue, as well as a registered veterinary technician. Cotter is a graphic designer who left her corporate design job to work with Stray Rescue.
In 2017, the pair founded Green Paw Rescue to move rescued animals to a more home-like environment and to help find homes for them. They work with Stray Rescue, 4 Paws 4 Rescue, and Care STL. They also wanted to open a rescue facility. He envisioned a farm, a rescue ranch in the country, with room for dogs.
“I didn’t want to move out of the city,” Cotter says. “Cats seemed a better fit for a city spot. We had visited Mauhaus a lot and liked it.”
“We thought, ‘Why not open a cat café in the city, one near downtown?’” Scimone says. “I realized we could build it ourselves. We had the idea to create a ‘home of the floating cat’ that captures the magical appeal of cats.”
Cotter remembered a cat from her childhood named Smoke: “He was a big, fluffy Maine Coon cat, a rescue, and a mischievous boy who appeared and disappeared in an instant, like the Cheshire cat.” He’s the model for the logo that Cotter designed.
Their bright café, with its busy-box design, already houses a coterie of kitties, which will entertain visitors with derring-do stunts, such as the full-tilt pole climb and table games of Let’s Topple that Glass. “There will be spills,” Cotter says, “and purrs and some cat cuddles.”
The two-story space includes several levels of cat trails that line the walls, as well as inset sleeping spaces. Art includes paintings, posters, sculpture, and an entire wall of Andy Warhol’s colorful prints of cats that they found at an estate sales.
There will be some important ground rules for visitors: 1. Make a reservation online. Cat cafés rarely have openings for walk-ins. There’s a $5 charge to enter the cat room. 2. You can’t bring your own cat. 3. Adoptions are handled by applications to the sponsoring rescue organization.
