Melbourne to get its first dog café
It could only happen in a town like Melbourne – a dog café in Collingwood.
This isn’t the kind of place where owners just bring the mutts while they sit down and have a bite to eat. It’s for dogs, it’s where the pooches can get a meal. The owners just tag along.
Welcome to the Dog House.
“Our first idea was to do a butcher shop for dogs,” co-owner Anuj Yadav, a hip-hop and R’n’B promoter told Broadsheet.
He says he and his business partner Charles Fernandez had been feeding their pooches raw meat from the same pet shop. And they noticed it wasn’t going down too well.
“I noticed my German shepherd was losing weight, and every now and then he’d throw up,” Yadav says.
“I was buying beef at $2 a kilo. The cheapest you can get beef [for human consumption] in New South Wales and Victoria is $6. That didn’t make sense to me. So I rang up all the abattoirs and all the wholesale meat suppliers and said, ‘I need to know, how are all these guys doing it for $2 or $2.50?’ They said, ‘They probably get it from the knackeries.’
“Even that’s fine. Dogs can have horsemeat if they want – they’re basically carnivores. But when I looked into it more, a lot of the knackeries that produce this pet meat could [do so] from diseased animals.”
So what’s on the Dog House menu for hounds? There’s raw grass-fed beef which, where possible, is organic. And there’s kangaroo, crocodile, emu and other game meats. And the food is displayed in a cabinet, just like you would get at a butcher shop.
The dogs will dine in 10 gated booths with dedicated staff serving up meals on plates. For the owners, there’s sandwiches and coffee.
The Dog House also offers cookies, doughnuts, cakes and muffins made with ingredients like chicken stock, chickpea flour and carob.
And for those special dogs, there’s herbal shampoos from Queensland company Donerite, handmade collars from Canada and even costumes. Think of Superman, Wonder Woman. Daschund owners might go for the hot-dog outfit.
by Leon Gettler, 14th June 2016
