Cat lovers listen up: A cat café is opening in Clermont. It will be a place where you can sit with a fresh cup of coffee and curl up with a cute kitty. The cats will also be available for adoption.
Earlier this year Sandra Cagan saw a TV story about a cat café in New York. She has a passion for cats and decided to turn that into a career. Cagan has been managing property for about two decades and already has the retail space in Clermont.
“I reached out to our local county commissioner in Lake County, Sean Parks. I emailed him and I said ‘You’re going to think I’m nuts but this is what I’m thinking of doing' and to my great surprise he responded almost immediately and said 'I don’t think this is nuts at all,' ”said Cagan.
Parker hooked her up with the South Lake Animal League- a no kill shelter. The league will provide twelve to fifteen cats at a time, and volunteers to take care of them and to help with their adoption.
Cagan is looking for a coffee business to lease space to. For health code reasons the cat play area will be sectioned off. So you can sit in the café and look at the cats through a window,“or if you choose you can go through a double door to get to the cat zone and sit in there with your coffee and pastry or what have you and play with the cats, have a cat sit on your lap, see if you’re interested in adopting them if not you know that’s OK too,” said Cagan.
They’re crowd funding to raise $75 thousand. The Clermont Cat Café is scheduled to open in the spring.