Ms. Ha was already in the food business and, in a sense, the cat business too. She and her husband, Simon Tung, run Macaron Parlour, a patisserie with two locations, in the East Village and the Upper West Side. A couple of years ago, she took in a stray that she found outside her apartment in Chinatown. She named him Mr. Socks. “I’d never had a cat before, and I was not expecting to like this one so much, especially considering he doesn’t seem to like me,” she said. Mr. Socks soon had company, when Ms. Ha adopted Pickle and Poussey from Kitty Kind, a cat rescue and adoption agency, and acquired a fourth cat, Bobo, for good measure. After a hoarder released 30 cats near the Macaron Parlour on Columbus Avenue, Ms. Ha began fostering strays, and developed a close relationship with Kitty Kind.

That’s when Ms. Legrand, one of the Macaron Parlour assistant chefs, began talking about cat cafes. Ms. Legrand, a lifelong cat lover who brought her two cats with her when she moved from Paris to New York, had visited cat cafes in Paris and Tokyo and sold Ms. Ha on the concept.

“We decided we need a cat cafe in New York,” Ms. Ha said. “We really need this.”

The New York Health Department, not surprisingly, does not allow food to be prepared where animals congregate. To clear that obstacle, Ms. Ha opened Meow Parlour Patisserie just around the corner on Ludlow Street, where her usual lineup of sweets, led by macarons in assorted flavors, is amplified by cat-themed cookies, some with cat faces and whiskers drawn in icing, others stamped out in cat shapes.

Customers reserve time on the Meow Parlour website (meowparlour.com), at a rate of $4 a half-hour, or $30 for the maximum stay of five hours. The cafe is almost fully booked through mid-March, and walk-ins are not accepted. Children under 10 may visit only on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, but one child and one adult get a discounted rate of $12 an hour for both.

Check-in consists of two steps. First, you sign a waiver — this can be done online in advance — agreeing to the dos and don’ts. Do not feed the cats. Do not wake a sleeping cat. (Gentle petting is O.K.) Do not pick up a cat without an employee’s permission. Do not use flash photography. Second, at the front desk, you take off your shoes and apply hand sanitizer. Once the formalities are taken care of, the cats await.