“As soon as we came up with Beans Cat Cafe, we decided the name was so perfect that we had to make this thing happen,” says Jess Cruz, who established the establishment with her partner, Justin Strika. The coffee shop enables clients to delight in drinks while engaging with a room filled with foster cats and kittens. “I quit my job in restaurant management one week before the COVID lockdown to make this a reality. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we took the $10,000 saved up for the wedding we had planned at the time, took out a small business loan, and used our own savings.” The couple invested months at their very first place in Beacon, remodeling it themselves. They opened in November of 2020, and opened a 2nd place in New Paltz in July of 2023.
Both born and raised in the Hudson Valley, the couple satisfied when interacting at a Speedway filling station in 2016. While Strika had actually matured with cats, Cruz’s feline-free youth home had actually motivated a yearning for her own cat. “Growing up, my mom didn’t like cats, and I would always beg her to get a dog or a cat,” she says. “When I got my first apartment, and noticed my neighbor had a cat, I realized I could get a cat. Right away I got Bean, my first cat. It only took six months after that to get another.”
Courtesy of Beans Cat Cafe
Cruz leapt at the concept when Strika proposed they open a cat coffee shop, a significantly popular business pattern that blends a coffee shop with cat treatment. The coffee shop cultivates shelter cats, providing food, beverage, and chance for visitors to hang around with the cats, all while promoting adoption. “We wanted to become somewhere where people who grew up like myself with parents who didn’t want cats, or people whose landlords wouldn’t allow cats, could come in and experience even a short-term emotional bond with a cat,” she describes.
When Cruz stopped her job to do something about it on the cat coffee shop in 2020, the couple initially had their eyes set on an area in New Paltz. “It’s a very eclectic, young, vibrant community,” says Strika. “It has that reputation for being interesting—weird in a good way.” Their tight budget plan, the business competitors, and their requirement to bring cats into their space made it tough to discover an area in New Paltz that satisfied all their requirements.
It was then that the couple turned towards Beacon, searching for any space to make their vision a reality. “I was given a piece of advice that really stuck with me,” says Cruz. “You don’t need everything right away. Get what you need to start, then you can build it up later. When we opened in Beacon, we didn’t have all the trash cans or furniture that we needed. Just anything to get the doors open.”
Within the very first year, the coffee shop had actually made 214 adoptions from the Hudson Valley Animal Rescue and Sanctuary, which offers all cats cultivated at the Cat Cafe. During this time, the couple harbored a strategy to broaden their business. “I was still determined to have a second location in New Paltz,” says Cruz. “On a whiteboard in the back of the location in Beacon, I wrote ‘100 months.’ When I did the math for those 100 months, it came out to be January 18, 2023. That was when we were going to get serious about looking at leases. When we finally went to look at our spot in New Paltz, it was January 20th.”
Courtesy of Beans Cat Cafe
With a little bit more experience and money under their belt, they had the ability to discover an area on Church Street in New Paltz. The 2nd place opened on July 14, total with a coffee shop room and a different cat room. Walking down the street in New Paltz, passersby peer into the window at the kittens sleeping on the windowsills. The cat room is a calm and lively environment, controlled by the list of visitor guidelines securing the animals from damaging or rude treatment. The cat room, home to around 20 foster cats at a time, is available to visitors for half-hour ($7) or one-hour ($12.50) sessions. Visitors who fall for a cat can adopt their brand-new animal by submitting an application with the HVAS, whose vetting procedure examines information such as leases and other household animals.
Courtesy of Beans Cat Cafe
Most visitors get a coffee or a newly squeezed lemonade to delight in together with their cat time. With coffee from Albany-based Chris’ Coffee, the coffee shop uses traditional espresso beverages from lattes ($4.25-$5.00) to macchiatos ($4.50-$5.50), in addition to a selection of seasonal specials. At the Beacon place, the coffee shop partners with Peaceful Provisions to offer pastries, while at the New Paltz place sweet treats originated from the Highland-based Mad Batters Pastries. “We wanted to make sure that we were doing quality, but also that we were putting some fun into it,” says Cruz. “We think of ourselves as very bubblegum.” This appears in the specials, the most recent function being the Barbie lemonade, a carbonated pomegranate lemonade with pink shine sprays. Cruz, Strika, and the other workers share the obligation for making beverages in addition to looking after the cats.
Between the 2 areas, Beans Cat Cafe is approaching almost 500 adoptions, showing the couple’s vision of opening space to share their love of cats through beverages and quality cat time to be a success. You can walk in or book your cat time online. “This space welcomes anyone for whom being with animals makes them feel better,” says Strika.
