1980s – Pain In The Bud

Buddy’s Cat Café Celebrates 2 Years Of Offering Customers The Chance To Lavish Affection And Treats On Buddy

Buddy’s Cat Café and Catnip Lounge has become a neighborhood fixture where feline lovers can enjoy their favorite caffeinated beverages while lavishing snacks and catnip on Buddy himself.

NEW YORK — When Buddy’s Cat Café and Catnip Lounge first opened its doors in late 2023, skeptics were quick to predict its demise.

“A cat cafe featuring only one cat sounds more like the selfish plot of the proprietor feline and less like a legitimate cat cafe experience,” the New York Times sniffed, while the New York Post derided the venture as “one chubby cat’s ludicrous scheme to gorge on endless snacks and catnip while customers line up to shower him with affection.”

Two years later, with a 4.8 out of 5 rating on Google and hundreds of regulars, Buddy’s Cat Café has not only been a success, it’s inspired other felines to open their own single-cat locations.

Mrs. Nakamura watches her students interact with Buddy, affectionately known to them as Badi-chan.

Mrs. Tomoko Nakamura, a teacher at the Japanese Academy of Manhattan, has been taking her class to Buddy’s since the cafe opened.

“Badi-chan very handsome and charming,” Mrs. Nakamura said, smiling as her students giggled and offered an array of crunchy treats to the lounging feline. “All my students love him!”

Sisters Dierdre and Stephanie Sullivan are regulars who say they take their kids to Buddy’s almost weekly.

“Madisyn, Skyelarr and Jaxon just love little Buddy,” Stephanie Sullivan said, calling other cat cafes “a tragedeigh in comparison.”

Buddy and friends during a Tabletop Tuesdays gathering at Buddy’s Cat Café and Catnip Lounge.

Since its opening, Buddy’s has featured an array of themed nights that cater to regulars with shared interests.

On Saturdays a lively crowd of people wearing perms, neon clothes and big shoulder pads flock to the cafe for Retro 80s Night. Sunday crowds gather to watch football with Buddy on the big screen TV, and Tabletop Tuesdays cater to miniature wargamers, with Buddy and his regulars continuing long-running campaigns in Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K.

One of the most popular themed nights is Freestyle Fridays, when local rappers and hip hop heads gather to spit bars, smoke blunts and collaborate on beats.

DJ Rashid, center, jubilantly hoists Buddy while the others cheer on a recent Freestyle Friday at Buddy’s Cat Cafe.

Buddy after indulging in too much catnip on Freestyle Friday.

Da Ill Collektah, a local underground emcee, rolls catnip blunts for the tabby proprietor so he can fully participate in the levity.

“Oh, that’s good ish!” Buddy said on a recent Friday as he exhaled a nimbus cloud of ‘nip smoke to cheers from the assembled hip hop heads.

“Watch out!” beatsmith Biggity Biggity Bryce exclaimed. “Buddy gonna bless us with a fiyah freestyle!”

Lysander The Lyrical Destroyer, a Brooklyn emcee and longtime “associate” of Buddy, said no other cat cafe could hope to compete.

“Buddy’s cafe got the freshest jams, the livest atmosphere, and the bang bang boogie don’t stop the boogie,” he noted. “But most of all, it’s got Buddy.”

Sunday Cats: An Incredible Cat Condo That Looks Like Ghostbusters HQ

Ghostbusters HQ cat condos and hobbit house litter boxes.

When I was a kid, the list of VHS tapes I’d worn out included Joe Dante’s Explorers, The Last Starfighter, The Last Dragon (the deliciously cheesy 80s kung fu classic set in Harlem, not the Bruce Lee film), Ridley Scott’s Legend, The Neverending Story, and maybe the first truly great comic book movie, 1989’s Tim Burton-directed Batman starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger.

And, of course, there was Ghostbusters.

As a kid it was adventurous, fun and even a bit spooky. As an adult it evokes a rush of warm nostalgia and joyful recognition that the actors – Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray and Signourney Weaver — had a hell of a lot of fun making the film.

To this day when I see a stack of books I have to restrain myself from exclaiming “Symmetrical book stacking! Just like the Philadelphia Mass Turbulence of 1947!” like Aykroyd hot on the trail of a haunting at the New York Public Library. When someone tries to convey an object of massive scale, I find myself echoing Hudson’s Winston: “That’s a big Twinkie.” When someone questions my expertise in an area, especially one I know nothing about, I slip into Murray’s New Yorkese: “Back off, man, I’m a scientist.”

That’s why ~~Buddy~~ I was so excited to see this cat condo build that’s designed to look like Ghostbusters HQ from the 1984 classic. ~~Buddy~~ I would love to have one of these things. Instagrammer Shawn Waite explained in a post that he was just kidding around when he proposed the idea, and his family pushed him to go for it:

“We got a new kitten (her name is Stria) a couple of months prior, and we were adding some cat furniture to our home for her. We thought that she may enjoy having something in our home office, which is where I have my vintage toy collection, so I joked that we should build a cat condo that looks like the Ghostbusters Firehouse play set so that it would fit with the theme of the office. My wife loved the idea, and our twin daughters (age 9) were excited for Stria to have a condo.”

Waite not only managed to retain the three-story interior layout with a scratching post cleverly taking the place of the fire pole, he tweaked the logo so there’s a dog in place of a ghost, just in case any jealous pooches get ideas about lounging in Stria’s sweet condo.

I’ve always wanted to learn to build stuff, especially after seeing examples like Waite’s build or the amazing Hobbit house litter box one cat servant made for his feline, Frodo.

frodohouse — Frodo the Cat and his hobbit house.

But hey, if I’m gonna go all out and build a spectacular lounging spot or bathroom for the Budster and mine 80s/90s childhood obsessions for ideas, wouldn’t the Thundercats HQ — known simply as the Cat’s Lair — be more appropriate?

The Cat’s Lair.

The Cat’s Lair

That's A Big Twinkie — “Let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. According to this morning’s sample, it would be a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds.” “That’s a big Twinkie.”

Another Start-Up Offers Overpriced Cat Junk

Looking to spend big on a bed your kitty will never use?

From the same school of design that brought you $300 cardboard cat trees and $40 cardboard boxes comes a line of overpriced cat bowls and beds.

Cat Person collaborated with “design agency” Layer for the Cat Person Collection, utilizing what its creators call a “minimal, contemporary aesthetic” meant to be “proudly displayed in the home and on social media.”

If by contemporary they mean overpriced crap in pastel colors that wouldn’t look out of place on the 80s-era USS Enterprise D, then I suppose it could work.

059010DA-2C02-48AC-ACED-3053B694C4F1 — “Where do you want the litter box, Captain?”

The “collection” has two items — the $40 “Mesa Bowl” that was allegedly designed to combat whisker fatigue, but looks like one bowl stacked on top of another and placed on a cafeteria tray; and the “Canopy Bed,” an $80 cushion that your cat will never use.

(The $20 Tiny Tent is looking better every day.)

Both were dreamed up by Benjamin Hubert, a British industrial designer best known for creating $2,600 chairs.

The press release for the Cat Person collection, which contains much self-congratulatory language about “disrupting industries” and other marketing-speak, claims the “collection” was based on extensive research into the wants and needs of cat owners, particularly millennials.

As a millennial who almost qualifies as a Gen-Xer, I suspect someone swapped out that research with a home decor survey from 1986, and this is the result.

We don’t accept money from sponsors or advertisers — hell, we don’t even have any ads — so any mention of cat-related products and food on this site is purely for the benefit of our readers. If at some point we get greedy and some company buys Buddy’s loyalty with a lifetime’s supply of turkey treats, we’ll fully disclose that conflict of interest.