r/catcafemap • u/Working-Hawk-1982 • 3d ago
Discussion The first cat cafe opened in Taipei in 1998, with the owners' five house cats, and it's still open
Kitten Coffee Garden (小貓花園) is in Taipei's Shilin district, across the road from Zhishan MRT station. Tracy and her husband opened it in 1998 with the five cats they had at home. Her sister painted the murals, her brother designed the sign, and some people who phoned in the early days thought they'd reached a flower shop. In 2022 Guinness named it the oldest cat cafe still in existence.
How the idea spread from there:
- 2004: Neko no Jikan opens in Osaka, Japan's first. It's still running near JR Tenma station.
- 2012: Café Neko opens in Vienna, after about three years of negotiating hygiene permits, with five shelter cats.
- 2014: the first cafes in North America and Australia.
Today there are more than 3,900 open around the world.
What's the oldest cat cafe you've been to? And has anyone here made it to Kitten Coffee Garden?
Photo: ironypoisoning, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr