KitTea Cat Lounge — Attraction in San Francisco

A rip off! I have been to cat cafes in Japan and remembered it fondly. We wanted to recreate the experience on my daughter’s birthday for her friends. The first thing we experienced instead when walking in the door was the strong smell of cat poop. When you are paying $100 for 4 people, they should clean the litter boxes before the people are let in.

In Japan, which has more of space premium that San Francisco, the cat cafes are 3x the size with tracks above to watch the cats. Here the cats can simply leave the “café” and disappear anytime they want. These are rescued cats and not comfortable with people. It’s dangerous and unfair to put rescue cats in this situation even though I think the owners would say they are “helping” them get “adopted.” For people paying a lot to play with cats its awful because they only interact when you feed them and very little after that.

The gal “helping” out went on “break” for 10 minutes during the hour and then all the cats disappeared. My 3 girls with me were bored and we left after spending 15 minutes of the hour I paid for. The owner of the café was rude to me initially when I asked to just reserve a ½ hour because we had many stops on a limo trip. I moved everything around so we could spend 45 minutes there and it was a big disappointment for my dauguhter's only 13th birthday. Clearly the focus here is to appeal to people who don’t know that this café is subpar although others were wondering where the cats went. Maybe a few tourists and have single visitors but not the way these cafes are the rage in Japan, have lots of varied and fun cats and cost ½ the price. Skip this “attraction” visit a shelter or Japan instead. Hopefully a competitor will soon do it better because if this was good then $25 would be worth it but clearly the focus is not on the cats or the customers just...

We visited KitTea cafe today (second time for me and the first time for my husband), we booked the new kitten lounge. Nowhere during the online registration does it ask you if you're looking to adopt or just visit. So we get there, and they show us to the kitten cafe. They lay out some ground rules, and then our assigned cat wrangler leaves us alone in the room. We were playing and playing, and then another worker comes in for some reason and then gives us some insight into the kittens (again, not our wrangler). The employee tells us that that two sets of brother and sister kittens are already adopted. So we were obviously disappointed. So we then walk out of the room to the lobby, and our wrangler is still sitting at the lobby computer. We asked why didn't you give us information on the kittens, specifically which ones were available to adopt. Her callous response was, "you never asked." She then went into some story about the process, and at the end, we were like, ok, you have our information (as its all required to make the initial reservation) and she refused to note on their system that we are looking to adopt. She just repeated herself, you have to email us. From a customer service standpoint, for an agency that I had thought a focus was to find forever homes for kittens and cats, they sure do make the communication impossible and frustrating. Needless to say, we are still in the market to find some adorable fur-babies, but we will certainly be adopting from somewhere else due to the experience we...

This is the most pleasant and relaxing place I have been to in a long time. While most of the spots were taken by reservation (which is a smart idea! Dont do what I did!) My loved one and i were able to sneak onto the last spot of the day. As we waited we enjoyed some delicious complimentary tea and some decently priced chips and chocolate we watched as the ladies who worked at the cafe interacted with customers with kindness and a professional politeness that left you calm and in a good mood even if you were one of those who arrived too late to hang out today. All of the kitties are rescues and after spending a few moments watching through the windows you can see just how happy and well loved they are. They all live to snuggle and play, and when they are done with humans they have their own little sanctuary in the back where they can refresh. The kitties will leap into the arms of employees for cuddling and the room that has them is filled with toys and things to climb that will keep them all happy. My favorite thing is though is that they have a booklet with specific info on each of the cats, and their interests and personality. As you wait and watch the kitties run and play with the group before you, you can learn fun facts and play the worlds cutest wheres Waldo as you watch the cats from the booklet. This is a wonderful place and I hope I can make it again any time I'm...