Cat Cafe without the Cafe idea

Help me out here:

So there's tons of research that says that hanging out with pets boost productivity and reduces stress. In Japan, they have these animal cafes with all sorts of critters that you pay to hang out with and have a coffee. Since US food safety doesn't like mixing live animals with food, I was thinking of nixing the cafe part of the Japanese cat cafe entirely. It would be geared to students and creative types looking for a place to work where there are also cats to hang out with. So, more like a library than a cafe. I'm not sure where exactly to go for this type of thing, because people who replicate the cat cafe model in the states just make two separate enterprises with a door connecting coffee shop with room filled with cats. I do know some of the odds and ends of how I want to run this, but I don't have a one-to-one model I could base my operation on.

I think there is a huge market in college towns for this sort of thing, and nixing food prep would ease the FDA off my back, but how doable would this venture be?