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(Image: Neko)
By Peiqing Ren, UW News Lab/Special to CHS
Capitol Hill’s first and only cat cafe has survived the pandemic and has changed up its adoption model. Neko — at the corner of Belmont and Pine — is now a kitten cafe.
“With the kittens, they’ve been very really easy to adopt out,” Neko general manager Caitlin Hanson told CHS earlier this year. “In the last month, we probably adopted out 30 kittens.”
As it reopened from the pandemic late last year, the original Capitol Hill Neko adopted a new mode of accepting healthy cats. A partnership with a regional shelter began sending adult cats to the sister Neko location in Bellingham while kittens were sent separately to the Seattle one.
“We act as a foster home for them,” said Katie Hurlbut, an employee at Neko.
The original Neko opened on Capitol Hill in 2017. The basement cafe at the corner of Pine and Belmont draws a crowd of passersby getting a peek at the kittens at play — and often sleeping — inside.
Caitlin Unsell and her partner Cory Jamies, the owners of the cafe, brought cat cafe culture back to Seattle after they lived in Japan for a couple of years.
“We were inspired to open Neko after living in Japan and visiting cat cafes in our free time. At that time there were none in the US. and we wanted people at home to experience it,” Unsell said.
The cafe now has two locations: one in Seattle and one in Bellingham.
“Both Nekos were a labor of love and much of the construction was done by ourselves,” Unsell said. “Many of the tables you see were built by our family from fallen trees on their property. Neko as a whole was nothing short of a wild dream come true and took a lot of hands to make it happen.”
When Neko Seattle first opened in 2017, it partnered with the Regional Animal Service of King County to house only Feline leukemia virus positive cats. FeLV is a feline-only virus that cannot be transmitted to humans, it does transmit to other cats, making them difficult to house in shelters. Neko offered an isolated community space for FeLV-positive cats in their cafe.
“There were essentially some veterinary board decisions made that changed how shelters do testing requirements for FeLV,” said Rae Kearns, the marketing manager at Neko. “They’re notoriously sort of finicky tests in order to protect more cats, essentially those tests were more limited, so we weren’t getting enough FeLV cats to really be making the impact we wanted to.”
Before its closure in March 2020 due to the pandemic, the cafe was able to adopt all the cats out to foster homes and Neko successfully found a home for 63 FeLV positive cats.
The kittens are a different story. Neko offers a “getting to know people” environment for all the kittens to help match them to a patient and perfect owner.
“We keep our kittens for however long they are comfortable to stay,” Hurlbut said. As they are hanging out with the visitors, Neko normally keeps all their kittens for about 6 to 8 weeks before interviewing customers who want to adopt them.
“If there are kittens who’ve been with us for a while and seem like they’re just really ready to go, we always prioritize them to the next step in the batch of adoptions,” Kearns said.
“We just gave them the time, space, and encouragement that they need,” Hanson added. “It starts with just learning how to trust humans again.”
Neko Seattle is located at 519 E Pine. Online reservations to the cafe are recommended. All cats are available through an online adoption process. You can learn more at nekocatcafe.com.
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PLEASE HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE!
Subscribe to CHS to help us pay writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.
Thank you for this, had no idea if their rich backstory—what a great place! Oxytocin central
Correction to your first sentence: there is a cat cafe in Wallingford on 45th and Stone Way called “the Meowtropolitan” I visited on July 31, 2016! =>.<=
I think it’s still open: https://www.seameow.com/
*Capitol Hill’s*
I’m glad that Neko and the like exist. We could probably have a dozen cat cafés, given the huge need.
This place should be covered by medical insurance. It’s therapy! Love this place.
I and my family love Neko Cafe!