Orange County’s First Cat Cafe Lands in Laguna Beach This Summer

Catmosphere Laguna, a cat café with felines, food, Champagne, and, presumably, bowls of milk, is opening later this summer on Forest Avenue in Laguna Beach. The café will serve as both a place to hang out and cuddle kitties and a foster home for the animals, which are all adoptable. Owner Gail Allyn Landau is planning for an August opening.

Cat cafes, which are basically coffee shops that have a bunch of cats roaming around, aren’t a new phenomenon. They’ve been popping up in China and Japan since the late 1990s. The first North American one opened in Montreal in 2014. But they’re still pretty rare around here, with just Crumbs & Whiskers and CatCafe Lounge in LA. This will be the first permanent cat cafe in Orange County (the mobile Moon Cat Café is also in the area).

Here how it works at Catmosphere Laguna: Local rescue organizations, including Laguna Woods Cat Club, Laguna Beach Animal Shelter, and Bluebell Foundation for Cats, bring cats in need of homes to the café, which has an eating area and, separated by a glass wall, a lounge for the cats. Customers who want to enter the lounge pay $22 ($12 for kids 6 to 17) for one hour. There’s only room for 12 people and 12 cats at a time, so owner Landau suggests making a reservation on the website before showing up. To adopt one of the cats, you need to visit at least twice and undergo a home check.

The café will serve salads, a cheese plate, and toasts, ranging from a sweet Nutella with strawberries and bananas combo to a savory toast with beet hummus, avocado, arugula, and cumin. To drink, expect beer, wine, and bubbly by the glass, plus coffee and tea.

Catmosphere Laguna’s hours will be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. And for those who want to be surrounded by meows all day, Catmosphere is hiring.

381 Forest Avenue, Laguna Beach, CA.