Hot coffee and cool cats await in new Ogden cafe
NEWS
Front entrance view of House Cat Cafe, located at 341 27th Street, Ogden, Utah. Deann Armes
Entering Ogden’s new House Cat Cafe is like stepping into the perfect sunny day.
Cheerful sherbet colors adorn the walls and furniture. Amazing pastries sit inside a gleaming glass case. Positively adorable cat-themed hats, jewelry, miniatures, glassware, stickers, and assorted other purrfectly marvelous, locally made merchandise is everywhere.
And there are cats - cute, cute cats, waiting for their furever homes.
“I always wanted to have my own place,” said Jenny Wilcox, who co-owns the new shop with Christine Otterstrom. “I took my kids to Tinkers (cat cafe in Salt Lake City) all the time, and I decided, ‘I want to do this.’ “
Wilcox is a pastry chef who created delectable treats at Grounds for Coffee on 25th Street for 13 years. Otterstrom has at least a decade of work as a barista under her belt.
“And we both know cats,” Otterstrom said. “She’s my best cat friend,” Wilcox added.
House Cat Cafe owners Jenny Wilcox (left) and Christina Otterstrom pictured at the cafe. Images provided
Two years ago, they started planning, fundraising, and shopping for a place to rent. The building at 341 27th St., which once housed a health food store and holistic medicine clinic, was laid out perfectly, Wilcox said.
There’s a commercial-grade kitchen, a room for the main cafe, a separate room with a big glass viewing window for the cats, a separate (locked) room for litter boxes and cat feeding areas, and a small room off the side for classes, private parties, and workshops.
The cats’ area has two doors. The first is a sturdy one with glass that opens into a screened entryway. There, a screen door opens into the cats’ playroom. This double-door system prevents active kitties from dashing into the shop, and also helps human customers understand that the cats’ safety and well-being are the cafe’s priority, Wilcox said.
“How many cats can fit in a small suitcase?” reads a social media post with this cafe photo from shop co-owner Christina Otterstrom.
For those who are allergic to cats but want to visit with feline-loving friends or family members, there are long counters with glass windows facing the cat playroom on either side of the entry door. Otterstrom said she didn’t want people to avoid visiting if they had an allergic family member. They want this to be a cozy family gathering spot.
The setup was painstakingly planned and reconfigured, depending on questions, Otterstrom said. The Weber-Morgan Health Department didn’t have standards and guidelines for a cat cafe, so Otterstrom said they pretty much wrote them as they went along. The health department would ask questions, Wilcox and Otterstrom would answer them or solve the issue, and they would move on to the next challenge.
“I feel like what we’ve done here is a learning process,” Otterstrom said.
They can accommodate up to six cats at once, but currently, they have five — a mama cat and her four kittens, which they found behind a friend’s garage earlier this summer.
Wilcox kept them for a while, then took them to the shelter, which returned them to Wilcox and Otterstrom as fosters. The House Cat Cafe is an official foster for the Weber County Animal Shelter, so spay/neuter procedures and initial vaccinations are covered.
But the other costs — litter, food, toys, and accessories like water fountains are all the House Cat Cafe’s responsibility. The cute merch and small entry fee to visit the cats helps cover their ongoing care.
“We’re helping them and they are helping us,” Wilcox said of the shelter relationship. “The care is expensive. And they can help us get the right animals in here.”
Cats that come to the cafe must be OK around other cats and people. That’s why currently, they have one family. Adding a sixth cat didn’t seem right when the others are all littermates.
And the people who want to visit the cats have to be old enough, in addition to paying the small fee for the privilege. The House Cat Cafe doesn’t have a hard minimum age yet, but generally, children younger than 12 need to be within a parent’s reach at all times.
It’s also great fun to watch the kitties through the window. Soup, a silly all-black gremlin, tiptoes along the window ledge, rubs against the glass, and will chase your finger moving around the cafe side of the window.
Mike Randle lives across the street and stopped in one recent morning for a slice of red velvet cake, a latte, and an hour with the cats.
“I’ve been waiting for these guys to open for months,” he said. “I’ve been watching them grow.”
Randle said he lost his beloved cat when he lived in South Dakota, and isn’t ready to have another. It was just too hard, he said. But he loves coming to sit with the cats and enjoy some coffee and treats. He’s pretty good with the “sps sps sps,” and gives good kitty chin scratches too.
“They’re so soothing, and the cats seem to like it,” Randle said. “This is a brilliant idea, because people aren’t going to be able to leave (the cats) behind.”
To adopt one of the cafe’s cats, a questionnaire must be completed and certain requirements agreed to, such as the kitty remaining an indoor cat and always using a carrier when traveling — standard for adoptions — followed by a waiting period. After that, if approved, the adoptive cat parent pays the fees at the shelter, brings back the receipt, and takes their new friend home.
“In general, going into business is scary,” Otterstrom said. Still, she is confident that their strong friendship and the love of coffee and cats will see them through. “You have to learn to be very communicative. It’s a good skill to have,” she said.
Besides, Wilcox makes the best tiramisu on the planet. Add cats and great coffee, and what’s not to love?
Editor’s Note: House Cat Cafe hosts “Knittin’ Kitten Afterhours,” a weekly event on Thursdays for visitors to stitch with cats in the lounge, and “Kids & Cats Storytime every Wednesday from 9:30 to 10 a.m.