Dog-friendly Pup'uccino Cafe comes to Franklin Street

Dogs and their owners will soon have a new place to socialize in Chapel Hill.

Pup’uccino Dog Rescue Cafe will be a Franklin Street coffee shop where customers can bring their dogs and get coffee or food.

And for people who are not dog owners, the cafe is a place where they can meet and play with rescue dogs available for adoption provided by local shelters.

Alicia Greenwalt, Pup’uccino founder and a graduate student at UNC, said the Chapel Hill location is just the start.

“We selected that location because it’s very central,” Greenwalt said. “There are a lot of families looking to adopt and a lot of dogs in need. Our goal is to open stores across the U.S. to get rescue dogs into their forever homes faster.”

The cafe will donate 5 percent of its annual proceeds to participating rescue shelters.

Greenwalt said 13 local rescues have already expressed interest in participating with the cafe and being part of the donation pool.

Pup’uccino has an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, which started Sept. 12 and will end Nov. 11, to raise the $70,000 necessary to open the cafe. There are 12 days left in the campaign and it raised $26,916 as of Tuesday.

Greenwalt said the goal is to open the cafe’s initial location in an existing space on Franklin Street in August 2016.

The cafe will have two areas. The front area will be the cafe portion where dogs will be leashed while the back area will be an unleashed space that will be monitored by employees.

“Instead of it being a wide open space where dogs can go buckwild, we’re having it be more of a lounge setting,” Greenwalt said.

Naomi Johnson — assistant director at Peak Lab Rescue in Apex, N.C., one of the participating shelters that will be in the donation pool — said she had never heard of an organization like Pup’uccino Cafe before.

“It sounds like a great idea,” Johnson said. “I put it on our website, and we had quite a bit of response.”

Greenwalt said she initially got the idea for the cafe from watching viral videos of cat cafes in Japan.

“I thought, we change them around a little bit and make it into a real cafe,” Greenwalt said.

Greenwalt said most of the cafe’s food and drink options would be for people rather than dogs and that she has been talking to local places, such as the Phoenix Bakery in Pittsboro and Counter Culture Coffee in Durham, to provide products for the cafe.

Greenwalt said she hopes to obtain an alcohol license as well.

Paige Patterson, a local dog owner and UNC junior, said she would bring her dog to a place like Pup’uccino Cafe.

“I think this would be an awesome opportunity to make people aware of adoption opportunities,” Patterson said.

“Being a college student, I think that college students who don’t get to see their dogs very often and miss their dogs would go to play with the dogs and dog owners would also go because it would be a nice place to get out with your dog and have fun.”

city@dailytarheel.com