Hookah bars find a place in America

updated 12:38 p.m. ET Jan. 2, 2006

SEATTLE - The Rabbit Hole is a maze of sofas and sectionals, mismatched, some worn to threads in places, full of soft spots that sink low to the ground. The lighting is low and dim; the music is usually alternative rock, played at a volume to match the light.

No alcohol is served at the Rabbit Hole — just soft drinks, and hookah.

Hookah is a flavored tobacco, inhaled through a tall, ornate pipe that sits on the floor; it has long been a popular pastime in Amman and Alexandria and all across the Middle East.

But this is Roosevelt Way in Seattle, cater-corner from University Mazda and down the street from Mamma Melina's restaurant. And that is something new — even as America is at war in the Middle East, this bit of the Middle East has found a place in America.

In liberal and literate Seattle, hookah lounges have opened on trendy downtown blocks and in predominantly white neighborhoods in the outer city, where the Rabbit Hole is located. Its customers are not middle-aged Egyptian men, but white kids from the suburbs.

"I'd almost call it an epidemic," said Sean O'Neill, 20, a personal trainer who lives in Tacoma, Wash., and first tried hookah last spring.

The contagion may stall — in November, Washington voters enacted one of the nation's strictest smoking bans. The law could shutter places like the Rabbit Hole; similar smoking bans could imperil hookah parlors around the country.

The laws are universally aimed at cigarette smoking; they may not specifically target hookah, but there is no exception for the parlors, either.

Elaine Thompson / AP A customer smokes inside The Rabbit Hole, a hookah lounge in Seattle's University District. In liberal and literate Seattle, hookah lounges have opened on trendy downtown blocks and in predominantly white neighborhoods in the outer city, where the Rabbit Hole is located. It's customers are mostly white kids from the suburbs.

The parlors first opened in the United States decades ago in the immigrant quarters of New York and Los Angeles, in neighborhoods like Astoria, Queens, and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. For years, they were patronized mostly by men of Egyptian, Lebanese or Syrian descent, and occasionally a curious American who recognized the pipes from a trip he might have taken.

In the past year or two, parlors have opened in college towns all over in the country, in Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin, often operated by foreign students from the Middle East, wishing for a piece of home.

But in recent months, hookah has spread to the world of hipsters and yuppies in cities in all regions of the country. Customers can smoke hookah in the Chi-Cha Lounge, a trendy, Latin-themed restaurant on U Street in Washington D.C., or at Mantra, an upscale French-Indian restaurant in Boston's Ladder District.

At the Chicago nightclub Zentra, hookah can be smoked amid techno music and belly dancers wearing body paint. There are hookah lounges in Denver, Houston, Las Vegas and Miami, complete with glass tables, plasma televisions and oxygen bars.

"It's at its largest demand ever in this country," said Brennan Appel, who runs Florida-based SouthSmoke.com, an online purveyor of hookah pipes and tobacco. "I don't think it's going away anytime soon. There's so much more room for the product to expand. Only a small percentage of Americans know about it."

In cities where only one hookah lounge existed, there are now seven or eight, Appel said. Where there were none, there is at least one. Because hookah is typically shared, friends introduce it to others. Even the Iraq war has played some role, Appel said; he suspects soldiers posted in the Gulf tried hookah, liked it and sought it out once they returned home.

"I haven't yet heard of a hookah lounge opening and going out of business," said Appel. The biggest demand for hookah, he said, is in California, Arizona, New York, Texas and Virginia.

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