A Cup of Love at Port St. Lucie’s First Cat Café

Enjoy a cup of joe at the The Kitty Cup in Port St. Lucie while giving cats in need of a home a little bit of lovin’

November 5, 2024

Melony Zaravelis with a few of the kittens at The Kitty Cup. Photo by Bridget Emelianchik

This summer, coffee started purr-colating in Port St. Lucie when the area’s very first cat café opened in June. The new shop is the creation of local resident Melony Zaravelis, who first encountered the creative concept during a visit to Omaha in 2021. She was intrigued, and after checking out about a dozen more similar businesses, she left behind her full-time job as an accountant to open The Kitty Cup.

The Zaravelis family is passionate about animal rescue. Melony’s husband, Angelo, and their daughter, Victoria, now 17, began volunteering with the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast in 2019. During the pandemic in 2020, the family fostered a cat named Frankie and ended up adopting him. That’s when Melony joined her family as a volunteer at the Humane Society— and the Zaravelises have since adopted two more cats, Bean and Ken, and fostered many more.

“I wanted to provide a better quality of life while they waited for their forever home,” Zaravelis says of deciding to open The Kitty Cup. “They get to live in a giant room, roaming freely, as opposed to a kennel in a stressful environment. Here, they get to socialize with other cats and people, making them more adoptable.”

The coffee shop side of The Kitty Cup. Photo by Bridget Emelianchik

One side of the space houses the coffee shop, with an espresso bar offering hot and cold coffees, iced tea, juices, lemonade, beer, seltzers, wine, pastries, charcuterie, sandwiches, and salads. It’s what’s on the other side of a 10-foot-wide window that makes this place extra special—the “cat room.”

With cat trees, scratchers, beds, toys, and couches for snuggling, 10 to 20 cats enjoy life to the fullest as they await adoption through partner shelters the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast and the Humane Society of St. Lucie County. Guests (ages 5 and up) can make reservations for 30- to 60-minute sessions to play with the kitties. In their first five months of business, Zaravelis projects they will have found homes for more than 100 cats.

Thinking back to the cat that started it all, Zaravelis says: “I tell Frankie that he changed the whole trajectory of my life. I truly feel that this is my calling.”