The Caffeinated Cat Café in Grover Beach is set to be a coffee-fueled feline adoption and fostering space 

Arroyo Grande resident Jaime Pierce's visits to cat cafes in Hawaii, Los Angeles, and San Francisco sparked a desire within the cat lover to open something similar in San Luis Obispo County.

"A cat cafe is a cozy experience where you can come in and buy a cup of coffee or a tea and shop some great gifts for cat lovers, pick up a few items," Pierce said. "Then you get to go into our cat lounge where you get to just hang out with adoptable cats that have been rescued locally."

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• Photo Courtesy Of Jaime Pierce
• SEASONED CARE The Caffeinated Cat Café owner Jaime Pierce has a long history of fostering cats and can be seen here enjoying her time with her first pair of foster cats Lin and Reggie.

Cat cafes originated in Taiwan, with the first one debuting in Taipei in 1998. It became popular with Japanese tourists especially, which contributed to the emergence of such spaces in Japan in the early 2000s. In the United States, the first cat cafe opened in Oakland in 2014, according to Pierce.

Poised to open in late September at 1601 West Grand Ave. in Grover Beach, Pierce's The Caffeinated Cat Café became a reality through community effort. On top of her own investment, Pierce started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the cafe. It aimed to collect $15,000. But 168 backers made the final amount soar to $16,513.

The Caffeinated Cat Café also plans to give back to the community. Cats that will eventually populate the cat lounge will come from the Feline Network of the Central Coast and the Cal Poly Cat Program.

"As we adopt out cats, they will provide more cats to come live on-site with us," Pierce said. "So, I already foster for both organizations, so we're very familiar with each other and how things work."

In fact, Pierce has fostered between 25 and 30 cats over the past couple of years. She's now fostering three cats and looks after four others as her pets.

"There are so many cats that there's just not enough foster homes for them to be able to be housed and then adopted," she said. "My hope is that I can take 10, 12 cats, maybe, at a time, and I can allow the rescues to be able to intake even more cats that way."

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• Photo From Cal Poly Cat Program's Facebook
• ALL PAWS TOGETHER The Caffeinated Cat Café aims to give back to the community by partnering with cat rescues like the Cal Poly Cat Program and the Feline Network of the Central Coast.

While The Caffeinated Cat Café is yet to be completed, Pierce told New Times that the space will have a coffee cart. "Like a smaller scale coffee bar," staff will serve specialty drinks like lattes from the cart. The cafe will also partner with a local bakery and dish out their baked goods. Then there's a cat-centric gift shop and, of course, the cat lounge.

"It's going to be a very cozy atmosphere, kind of like a home environment where it's lots of cozy furniture and furniture for cats, too," Pierce said. "You'll walk into the cat room there, and the cats are all enclosed, so they cannot come out to our coffee area. But you can take your coffee into the cat area if you'd like."

Interested in adopting a cat while strolling through the lounge? It'll cost around $100, and the full rate will go back to the respective rescue program the cat came from. Visitors can also choose to foster the cafe cats.

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• Photo Courtesy Of Jaime Pierce
• MORE THAN CATS AND COFFEE The Caffeinated Cat Café visitors can also scour a cat-centric gift shop that offers keychains, tote bags, and T-shirts.

Eventually, Pierce hopes to open the cafe with roughly eight employees. She's willing to train them in the art of coffee-making but all applicants must have an inherent love for cats.

"Cats, I believe they're so good for our mental health. ... You can just kind of hang out with them, and ... they don't need much from you," she said. "I always have a cat on my lap. It does really, you know, relaxes me and makes me feel better every day. So I can't imagine not having cats around." Δ

Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal wants to check out the cat lounge with a mocha in hand. Send catnip to [email protected].