Orlando Cat Café marks 1 year, 135 kitty adoptions, and counting

Any coffeehouse can sell you a cup of joe. But at the Orlando Cat Café, you get your java with the warm, fuzzy feeling of promoting feline welfare and the chance to scratch a kitty behind the ears.

The unique Lake County venture — where you can pay a small fee to join the Kitty Play Area with a dozen or more adoptable cats, or simply sip and watch — celebrated its first anniversary Friday. The “paw-ty” featured cats, cake, raffle prizes and some adoptive pet parents returning to where it all started.

“I can’t do anything about global warming or Darfur or Syria, but I have 20 years in property management and development, and I’m a lifelong lover of cats,” says owner Sandra Cagan, 52, who started the café as a collaboration with The Animal League of Lake County and Axum Coffee. “This has meaning to me.”

The café, in the Town Center at Cagan Crossings, 4 miles west of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, takes mostly adult cats from the nonprofit Animal League, lets them roam the play area and hopes the visitors will fall in love with one. It’s working.

To date, the café has had 22,000 visitors from all over the world, each paying $4 to $8 to rub elbows with the cats. All profits go to The Animal League; Cagan herself takes no salary.

Best of all, she says, 135 cats have been adopted — including a small, sleek black kitty named Albus, after the Harry Potter character Albus Dumbledore.

“At first I thought, ‘Cats and coffee? ” admits Johann Robert Wood, 32, a graduate student who first visited the café in January, adopting Albus two visits later. “But we had looked at other places, and they made me kind of sad. At the Cat Café, it was like having all these cats in a big living room, so we could really see their sociability. … Albus might soon get a friend.”

Meanwhile, Cagan fields two to three inquiries a week from people interested in replicating the cat café model. “I just got one from Lebanon,” she says.