Tree House Cat Cafe (Reserve your spot today!) — Restaurant in Rogers Park Township

This is nothing like a cat cafe. Before booking the appointment I had called & checked if there would be cats available since I was planning to reserve the last slot before they closed. I was told that there usually are 3-4 cats available any any given time in the day. The cafe only has drinks & the food options are mostly bars. There were 3 cats in the area but only 1 was out of the cage available to play. Since the other 2 cats were new they were in a closed cage getting acclimated which I understand but is not fair to people visiting to experience playing with cats. Paying $30 for a family of 3 is expensive just to drive all the way to spend time with one cat. Also when we entered a staff member entered with us with food for the 1 cat that was outside the cage. She said sorry it's time for her dinner. Why would you allow people to book an appt slot when you are aware that it's dinner time for the cat & they would probably want to rest after eating. We waited 10mins from our 30min appt for the cat to finish eating. My 5yr old was so disappointed. Extremely underwhelming & disappointing experience. I felt cheated. We did not go all the way just for drinks. I could have gone to any coffee shops around my neighborhood for much cheaper. We love supporting pet shelters & we were all very excited to visit. When I expressed some of my concern to the barista she said there are usually more cats earlier in the day & many more available for adoption on the 1st floor of the building but we can't play with them. They offer tours during the day for people interested in adoptions but can only look at them through cages. I wish this information was shared before we booked. I would not be going back & will look at other...

Extremely disappointing, and not worth $14/person. We went on 9/28/19- i was bit several times. and barely had any interactions with cats. For one, there were 3 cats that the staff let us knew “weren’t friendly”, so didn’t like to be pet. But they told us this after we tried to pet 2 of those cats, and 1 just as we were touching them. Why would you have 3 cats in a cafe that don’t like to be pet? One of those and 3 other of the “nice” cats bit me (not hard, but not playful), and cats love me/we have 2. One reason was probably that when we went there for our 1 hour reservation, there were literally 10 people there total trying to interact with about 10-12 cats- all crammed in one room. We were astounded- Cats sleep much of the day, and don’t always take to lots of people trying to pet them continuously. So obviously that wasn’t working, so we and many people weren’t able to interact much at all with cats, and mainly had to sit (or often stand as there are not enough seats) and looked at other people try to pet/play with cats. We then found out this was the 5th hour that day that people had been with the cats- so obviously they were mostly overstimulated and not affectionate. IMO it’s not fair to the cats who are up for adoption, since people don’t get to truly know a cat; and not fair for the paying customers/potential adopters. I couldn’t understand it- I mean I started to think they must just be trying to make as much money as they can? They need to significantly reduce the number of customers per hour, and schedule breaks for he cats. This should have been free, with a small...

Look, I love supporting shelters so I was very excited to visit this cat cafe. Usually when thinking of a cat cafe, I think of the catcade but with food or drinks available. This was nothing like that. There were 2 senior cats and that is it. They wanted nothing to do with us although we tried to play. The drinks were mediocre at most. When we left the barista asked if we had fun, which we answered honestly and received a “sorry about that. that will be 20$”. I will not be coming back and will continue supporting the catcade instead. Extremely underwhelming and disappointing experience.

edit: I want to clarify there’s nothing wrong with senior cats, but advertising this as a cat cafe is really misleading. especially because the reason you pay to go is because you want to interact with the cats, but they were older and just wanted to sleep, which again is fine, but at least tell us they won’t want anything to do with us before we come and waste our time. im glad the cats have been adopted but again, I came to play with cats and also support a rescue, not just spend money and sit around. I would much rather just donate rather than waste my time on a...