His name is Keelan, and I love him.
I was a goner the moment I saw his wide and wild amber eyes and vibrant ginger hair, which looked especially fiery next to the soft, white fluff on his belly. I waved a feather in the air, and Keelan shot out from under a nearby chair, whacking it from my hand with an enthusiastic but tender attack. My heart leapt.
But the thing is, I think I fell in love with about a half-dozen different cats during my recent 50-minute visit to Mewsic Kitty Cafe. Alexis, a cranky 7-year-old with a dark-gray patch of hair around one eye, also stole my heart that afternoon.
It was the best Thursday I’ve had in a long time — an escape from pressing deadlines and the aggressive news cycle. A time to focus solely on these little bundles of fuzz, who want nothing more than to entertain and be entertained. (And to scratch — admittedly there was an, um, incident between me and a black-and-white jerk who shall go unnamed.)
Opened on Nolensville Pike in April by the husband-and-wife team of Thien and Maegan Phan, Mewsic Kitty Cafe is where you can go to escape humans for a bit without the full-time commitment of pet ownership. For $12, you get 50 minutes to play, pet and cuddle as many as 15 different cats. Since the cafe allows only 15 people in at a time, Mewsic Kitty isn’t lying when it advertises “a cat for every lap” on its Hatch Show Print-style poster.
The idea to open a cat cafe first occurred to Maegan while she was working at the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute. She noticed that such kitty-centric establishments had been gaining popularity in Japan.
“I thought that was one of the coolest ideas ever, and at the time there weren’t any in the U.S.,” she says. “Over the next few years I saw them start to make their way stateside, and I was like, ‘OK, if they can do one in South Carolina or Georgia, Tennessee could probably go for this too.’ ”
The cafe, housed in the Woodbine cafe space once occupied by Red Bicycle, is patently Nashville. It’s packed with as many music puns and references as paws. Each animal has a stage name — Catsy Cline, Gram Pawsons, Keith Furban — and musical instruments and accessories are everywhere. Guitar cases sit open on the floor, turned into cat beds with the addition of a soft blanket. Old drums hang on the wall, some of them converted into cozy cat nooks with a few carpet-lined shelves.
In the entryway there’s a drawing of a cat — Minnie Purrl — wearing a floral hat with the price tag attached, and just inside the shop there’s a large mural, a painted version of a famous photo of Johnny Cash holding a meowing kitten.
There’s a bucket of toys — feathers, strings tied to drumsticks, crinkly foil balls and felt mice — so you can lure the kitties in your direction. You can set up camp at a small table with a cup of Bongo Java coffee and a locally made treat from Leeuw Vegan Bakery or The Wild Muffin, and let the animals come to you. And you may be surprised at just how many of the kitties eventually saunter up to you.
The cats are all adoptable. They’re brought in from the Nashville Cat Rescue, a local nonprofit that has been finding furever homes for kittens and cats since 2005, and they’re very thoughtful about who gets to make an a-purr-ance at the catfe.
“The Nashville Cat Rescue is all foster- and volunteer-run, so when the cats aren’t with us, they’re in foster homes,” says Maegan. “The fosters get to see the cats interacting with their own cats and their families, so we rely on them to select cats that would thrive in this kind of environment.”
Maegan laughs when she admits her own two cats would probably hate it at the shop.
So far the Mewsic Kitty Cafe has coordinated 12 adoptions, and when I visited, they were very close to hitting No. 13. A little blond girl, maybe 9 or 10 years old, took a liking to a striking fluffy gray cat named Catty Underwood.
“Did you come to get a cat today, or are you just looking?” I asked her as she wriggled a piece of string in her new best friend’s direction.
“Just looking,” she said. “But I just have to have her.”
A minute later her friend comes over. “Did your mom say yes?”
“No, but she will.”
