Shop caters for coffee lovers and their cats

Angela Gonçalves

Imagine a relaxing afternoon with a cup of coffee, a cake and a cat on your lap. That’s exactly what the local café ‘Meows Corner Meeting’ is offering its customers.
Angela Gonçalves owns this cat café at the corner of Calçada do Poço near the St Lazarus’ Church. She told the Times that she started ‘Meows Corner Meeting’ around a year ago. “When I travelled to Hong Kong and Taiwan, I saw many cafés like this. I am a cat lover myself. Therefore, I wanted to open one as well,” she said.
When the Times visited the café, there were four cats napping at different corners of the shop. Ms Gonçalves said that the cats were all her pets. They all lived at her home and now they reside in the café.
In terms of her patrons, the owner said that many of them are young people or students, with females the majority. “Usually [customers] are young people. Sometimes there are older people… They usually have cats at home as well or are cat lovers,” she said.
Sometimes when the customers do not know how to interact with the cats, she has to intervene. “They may suddenly hold the cats, which the cats don’t really like, and we have to talk to them about it,” she said. Some customers would even bring their own cats to the café. However, the owner said that those cats would usually be too afraid to move. “But some are not afraid of anything and would walk around, even eat the food of our cats like they are really familiar with the place,” she said.
When it comes to the business side of things, Ms Gonçalves said that the performance is not very impressive. But she already has a group of patrons. While business is good on the weekends, she said that the café can be pretty quiet on weekdays. “Maybe there are too many choices [of café],” she said.
Ms Gonçalves told the Times that she once worked in the Municipal Kennel and believes that the government’s animal policy has room to improve. “The stray cat and dog issue in Macau is pretty serious. Stray cats usually hide at the hills like the Guia Hill and the Mong Ha Hill,” she said.
“[The Municipal Kennel] does not euthanize stray cats. They only catch them, neuter them and return them… This has helped to control the number but does not help the stray issue much,” she added.
Ms Gonçalves suggested that this is a matter of civic education. “We should teach the next generation how to prevent making cats and dogs homeless. The stray problem exists because people just bought them and abandoned them”. She concluded that there should also be tighter restriction on pet shops to ensure that animals are not over-bred.