Kitty Cafe back up and running after a ‘paws’!

After months in lockdown, the popular eatery returns – with some new additions. GRAHAM YOUNG reports

WHEN the Kitty Cafe opened in the Grand Central shopping centre last spring, company founder Kate Charles-Richards never imagined not being able to celebrate its first birthday because of a pandemic. Or that near neighbour and four-floor department store John Lewis would fail to reach its own fifth birthday due on September 24.

But after being closed for more than four months because of the coronavirus lockdown, the good news for cat lovers is that Kitty Cafe is back open and taking bookings once more.

The cafe originally opened in spring 2019 and was manned by 25 employees, selected from 4,000 applicants.

It began to acclimatise its 28 cats in May last year before opening fully to the public in June – but missed out on being able to celebrate its first birthday this year.

In business terms, it will be October before it can celebrate 12 months of trading, all things being equal.

Kate said: “We didn’t want to reopen on July 4 when we could have done because we wanted to have full approval from the council.

“We have found that all of the measures we took to set up the cafe have come into their own and we have only had to make minor adjustments to reopen.

“The cats are delighted to see everyone again and so are the staff, everyone is getting back into the swing of everything.

Kate, who used lockdown to add cat-faced masks to her online merchandising store, added: “We’ve managed to keep on 99 per cent of the staff across here, Leeds and Nottingham and we think we are in a better place than many other businesses – we’re not down as much as we feared.

“We already had social distancing in place because of the cats and our kitchen was completely separate, too.

“We also already had table service and a one-way system around the cafe, so we were already a long way there and in the grand scheme of things we didn’t have a lot of things to do to be able to reopen safely.”

Kate hasn’t just had the pandemic to deal with as well as her cats, but also the news that Carluccio’s has closed next door and John Lewis as well – and that’s on top of Muffin Break opposite having not been replaced since it closed in January 2019.

Luckily, Grand Central’s loos are nearby to draw people in its direction.

But instead of running a sheet of Perspex down the centre of the escalators towards Stephenson Street, the way up has been closed for social distancing while the way down has been kept running.

This means shoppers arriving on foot from the Stephenson Street / Lower Temple Street / New Street direction now have to walk to the escalators inside the main Grand Central atrium and then come back on themselves to reach Kitty

Kitty Cafe founder Kate Charles-Richards is meeting new challenges upon reopening the cafe