Smitten Kitten Cat Cafe

Holly Moss signed a five-year lease on a 2,500-square-foot unit in a strip centre on East 96th Street in August 2022, told the Indianapolis Business Journal she would open at the beginning of December, and — as almost always happens with a build-out involving live animals and a health department — opened in January 2023 instead. Smitten Kitten was Hamilton County's first cat café, Indiana's sixth, and the second in the Indianapolis metro after Nine Lives in Fountain Square. Moss runs it with her son Collin Fields and an independent investor, Al Wilkie, and staffs it with a dozen or so part-timers across six days a week.

The layout is the standard two-room solution the health code requires and the better cat cafés make a virtue of: a proper café at the front serving espresso, tea and snacks, and a sealed lounge behind it where the cats live. Coffee is from Noble Coffee & Tea Co. in Noblesville, with almond and oat milk as standard, and the pastries come from local bakers. Lounge time is booked in blocks — roughly $9 for half an hour, $18 for a full one — and the centrepiece is a nine-foot cat tree built to order by 900 North Studios. Adoptions run through the Hamilton County Humane Society. For a guide like this one the relevant fact is simply that no alcohol is served here and none is implied: it is a suburban room where the social offer is coffee and company, in a county whose only fully alcohol-free bar, Memento Zero Proof in Fishers, shut in 2024 and has not been replaced. The hours are daytime, closing at 6pm most days and 2pm on Saturday, so it is a morning or afternoon proposition rather than a night out, and the café is shut on Tuesdays. It is also worth being clear about what it is and is not. This is a coffee shop with cats, not a zero-proof cocktail bar — there is no named non-alcoholic drink list, no de-alcoholised wine and no NA beer, and nobody is going to build you a spirit-free negroni. What it offers is the thing Hamilton County otherwise lacks: an unambiguously alcohol-free social room where the reason to be there is not the drink. For a zero-proof menu in the same county you are looking at the two Orangily shops for retail or a drive down to Mass Ave, and the nearest alcohol-free evening room is The Mood on Mundy Drive, eight minutes north.