First permanent New World-style cat café

The first New World-style cat café that has stayed open on a permanent basis is Cat Café Montreal (aka Le Café des Chats), based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which opened in August 2014. Just a month later, a second one also opened there: Café Chat L'Heureux. Whereas the primary role of cat cafés in the East and elsewhere in the Old World is usually to allow people to engage with the cats (especially in Japan where the keeping of pets is forbidden in many apartment blocks), in the New World their primary function is adoption, i.e., the rehousing of stray and abandoned or unwanted cats. As a result, these tend to work very closely with local cat and other animal shelters.

Prior to the opening of the two Montreal cat cafés mentioned here, there had been various so-called pop-up cat cafes in the USA, the first one opening on 24 April 2014 in New York City. However, these only stayed open for a few days (four days in the case of the NYC cat café), their sole purpose being simply to publicise (especially via media coverage) the adoption of cats.