Business & Tech

Catman Cafe a Childhood Dream Come True in Mansfield

Owner Steve Cerullo shares the story of the Catman Cafe.

It's been 11 years since Steve Cerullo started the Catman Café with his childhood friend Michael “Catman” Cataldo.  While the road has been rocky, Cerullo feels he’s made a good business here in Mansfield.

Cerullo said he’s always been in the restaurant business, and leaving it is very tough for him.

“It’s always a little crazy here,” he said. “This business does affect you a little bit. I mean my wife’s been to Italy, Ireland and I just can’t leave this place for more than three days.”

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Cerullo said he and Cataldo had been friends since he can remember. He said he made it into the restaurant business while Cataldo went into the insurance business, at which Cataldo was very successful.

“He won a ton of salesman awards,” Cerullo said. “He kept saying to me when are we going to open up the bar? So we did.”

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Cerullo said he started in the restaurant business in 1978 in a restaurant called the Piller House. Two months later, the Blizzard of '78 hit.

“I was stranded there for three days,” he said with a chuckle. “It was the second month of my career, working as a bus boy. There was ten of us there. We played hide and seek and the owner allowed us to drink beer and wine and we ate very well. But we did sleep on table clothes.”

In the 80s, Cerullo owned a franchise restaurant, but found he had hit a crossroads there.

“It didn’t appeal to me,” he said. “It’s either you own your own place or you go to the corporate office and work for 30 years. I’ve always been a very independent person.  It wasn’t until I moved to Quincy and started working at Finnian’s that I got serious. Within five years I saved enough money to put a down payment on a bar. I also bought a condo and got married. It was time to grow up.”

Cerullo also bought the Anvil Pub in Wrentham, which has since been bought and turned into Mr. Dooley’s Bar and Grille. While Cerullo said running the Anvil Pub was fun, it was a men-only bar at the time that he had no desire in owning. 

“Wrentham’s changed,” he said. “[The Catman] was a bar like that, but I turned it into more of an eatery because I didn’t want a bar anymore. It’s just the way society changed, and besides that it’s nicer.”

He said the transition took a long time because the building was also a famous and old dinner back in the day. He added it hadn’t been well looked after.

“I put over $100,000 with the roof, the plumbing, the electric and I knocked some walls down,” he said. “It took me a long time, but I’ve almost doubled the business in ten years.”

He said it hasn’t been easy. His friend Michael Cataldo, for whom the restaurant is named, was never in the best of health.

“It was a sad thing, he always had health issues and he just had some bad luck,” he said.

Cataldo passed away last year. Cerullo said he himself was in dire straights with leukemia.

“It beats the crap out of you,” he said. “Thank God I had a lot of good friends, but I beat it. You still have to pay them though, but Mansfield’s been really good to me.”

The Catman is located on 16 Old Colony Road and is open every day from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.


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