Burger and Ron, two of the most social cat residents at KitTea, a cat cafe and foster home for cats in San Francisco, have noticed the significant decrease in the number of their visitors on a daily basis. And so has the cafe’s owner.
In the past, visitors to the cafe could eat sweet waffles and drink green tea while cats purred, lounged about, and did the other things only cats can do, but KitTea is yet another San Francisco business that has struggled to remain in business following the COVID-19 sheltering-in-place protocols that were put in place this past March.
Courtney Hatt, the owner of KitTea, knew back then the near future would be financially challenging, so she did what many other business owners have also done: started a GoFundMe page.
“Our costs are very high, especially from taking care of cats for their medical needs and food, and everything else, the care that goes into it,” Hatt told SFGATE. “The rent is extremely expensive for Hayes Valley. We got into this lease when it was very competitive to find a commercial space back in 2014, so we had to quickly ask for support from the community.”
The GoFundMe page has since raised just over $40,000, which was its goal amount, with over 800 donors chipping in to help. Hatt has made sure that no single dollar goes to waste.
Hatt says the money has gone to paying their current $10,000 a month rent, feeding the cats, paying her shortened staff, and to keeping the lights on. It costs $1,000 a week to just feed the cats.
KitTea temporarily closed its doors in March due to the sheltering-in-place orders and then opened up again for business in mid-June. Despite the cafe’s sometimes financial uncertainty, KitTea was able to successfully adapt to the age of COVID-19 and serve its customers.
“We’ve always been a clean and sanitized space to begin with,” says Hatt. “It was always standard that people had to take their shoes off and sanitize their hands before going in because things can spread between cats as well, and we don’t want the cats or the people to get sick.”
“Now we’ve upped our game in cleaning,” Hatt adds. “Instead of the visiting times being an hour long like how they used to be, each visit is now forty minutes long and twenty minutes go into sanitizing the space for the next guests. We wear our masks. Masks are never taken off.”
The cafe is no longer able to serve any of their cafe goods, such as waffles, sandwiches, salads and soups, in order to minimize any unnecessary and risky contact between the customers, the staff and the cats. But customers do leave with their choice of bottled green or herbal tea to drink once they leave.
Although the number of customers has dropped, the number of rescue kittens KitTea take in has done the opposite: It dramatically increased. Why? Kitten season.
Hatt explains that kitten season occurs in the spring and goes until October. It’s when the weather is relatively warm, which lasts longer now due to global warming, and feral cats have babies. Due to COVID-19, spay and neuter programs were halted because neither was considered to be an essential operation, thus resulting in an abundance of kittens. KitTea has always gotten their cats from local shelters, but the increased number of cats also meant an increased number of cats being euthanized at local overpopulated animal shelters.
“We decided to do our part and we pulled in 25 kittens in the first round. Then we got rid of our tea lounge entirely and we started a kitten room,” Hatt says. “Now we’re no longer a cat cafe, we’re just like a rescue space now.”
The recent number of adoptions at KitTea has also increased. Hatt attributes this to a lot of people having time off and working from home because of the shelter-in-place orders. “Often it would take weeks to adopt out a kitten and now people are fighting over kittens. That’s been a silver lining,” she says.
Another silver lining has been the securing of a new location for the cat cafe on Valencia Street next to Arizmendi Bakery. The move will take place in October, so the cafe temporarily won’t be taking in any more kittens. As of last week, there are nine kittens left searching for a permanent home and 14 cats eagerly awaiting some company.
KitTea's GoFundMe page can be found here.
Fernando Martinez is an editorial assistant at SFGATE. Email: fernando.martinez@sfgate.com | Twitter: @fernan_dough
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