Hookah cafes' future hazy

BY ANDREW L. WANG
Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO - The air hung heavy with the syrupy sweet fragrance of strawberry-, apple- and mango-flavored tobaccos and a veil of smoke.

Dozens of customers in the Alibaba Cafe and Restaurant in Chicago's Albany Park sat around small wooden tables, dipping chunks of flat bread in wide platters of hummus and baba ghanoush and blowing long plumes of smoke from their hookahs, a Middle Eastern brand of water pipe, into the air.

Mike Amin sat with three friends in a back corner one night last week, smoking from the hookah and talking about a proposal in Chicago to ban smoking in bars and restaurants.

Amin, a 34-year-old insurance agent, said such a ban would deal a severe blow to the estimated 20 lounges and restaurants that offer hookah in the city.

"If they ban it, it'll kill the business," said Amin, who has been smoking - also known in various locales as shishas, narghiles and hubbly-bubblies - for about three years.

As the City Council moves toward a blanket smoking ban for all bars and restaurants in Chicago, much discussion has focused on more mainstream establishments. But for hookah lounges - where smoking the pipe after a late dinner and chatting with friends into the early morning hours is the norm - the ban threatens to disrupt the hubs of activity for the city's North African and Middle Eastern immigrants.

Smoked for centuries across North Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, hookahs are a water pipe that uses hot coals to heat moistened, flavored tobaccos, generating smoke. The pipes are usually a few feet tall with a large glass or plastic reservoir at the bottom for the water and a long, snaking tube through which the smoker draws smoke from the tobacco through the water and into the mouth.

More recently, bars, restaurants and bars in cities in Europe and North America have begun offering hookahs to patrons. In the United States, they have become popular around college campuses, particularly among students old enough to smoke but too young to buy alcohol.

The Chicago City Council's health committee approved the smoking ban Oct. 28, but it has not been brought up for a vote by the entire council.

Alderman Ed Smith, the committee chairman, said at the time he would delay action to give opponents of the ban time to make counterproposals. Some council members and restaurant industry lobbyists are calling for an exemption for free-standing taverns and bars in restaurants that are separate from eating areas, but hookah bars have not been broached in discussions.

The proposed ban "doesn't specifically include hookah lounges, but it does include hookahs," said Leo S. McCord, the health committee coordinator and a Smith aide.

The ordinance, in its definition of smoking, includes hookahs as a "lighted tobacco product," and because they serve food, many hookah establishments fall under the ordinance's definition of a restaurant.

The main room at Alibaba was filled with plenty of lighted tobacco products and smoking customers last Thursday night as Muslim patrons celebrated Eid ul-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, said Alex Attia, the cafe's general manager.

Because hookahs make up about half of the cafe's sales, business would take a major hit if smoking was banned, Attia said.

But beyond hurting it financially, customers said the smoking ban would change the cafe's basic character.

"This is a very special place where the people can come and smoke, maybe grab a bite to eat, relax," said Hussein Elfoly, 54, a regular customer and a close friend of Attia.

"It's the combination of the eating and the smoking," he added. "If you lose the smoking, then people will go somewhere else. They will find the smoke."

Kal Atua, 40, an engineer, said he started smoking as a teenager in Alexandria, Egypt, but quit for health reasons when he came to the United States in 1994. Because about half of his Egyptian friends smoke shisha, the hookah cafes are where they always gather.

Even though he doesn't partake of the hookah, "if you ask me whether I'd rather go to Starbucks, I'd rather come here," he said. "I'll take the second-hand smoke if I can hang out with my friends."

Atua's friend Amin said a ban would do more than throw a wrench in his social activities. It could affect his bottom line, he said.

"You do a lot of business here," Amin said, adding that many of his customers, about 70 percent of whom are of Middle Eastern descent, feel comfortable conducting negotiations in a more relaxed setting. "I don't do a lot of business in my office anymore."

For another companion, Ali Khalifa, 31, the scents, smoke and surroundings are pleasant reminders of growing up in Egypt.

"It's like a little piece of home," he said. "The whole atmosphere is like the cafes they have there."

Most of the customers who go to Sigara Hookah Cafe and Lounge in Chicago's trendy Wicker Park neighborhood are professionals in their late twenties, and about half of them are people who don't smoke cigarettes but nevertheless enjoy hookahs, said Chris Homberg, a co-owner.

A smoking ban would cripple his business, which gets about 70 percent of its revenues from hookahs, Homberg said.

"We built the business around this tradition," he said. "Competition (among bars) is brutal and that's our competitive edge."

Hookah establishments have run into trouble in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted a smoking ban in 2003. A year later, about 20 hookah cafe owners in Astoria, Queens, took up their case with the local city councilman when the health department began citing them for allowing shisha smoking.

Hookah bars were never taken into account when New York City's non-smoking ordinance was passed, Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. said. The ban included an exemption for cigar bars, but because the hookah establishments do not serve alcohol, they didn't fall into that category.

Vallone asked the city health department to loosen up enforcement and until now, he said, the hookah bars in his district have continued doing business as usual.

He said he has been pushing for a "cultural exemption" for the businesses, but so far has been unsuccessful.

"We're hoping that there will be some change in the law that will help the situation," he said.

Back at Alibaba in Chicago, Amin said he sees only one possible positive benefit to a smoking ban that would shut down hookah lounges and restaurants: "If they ban it," he joked, "maybe it will help me quit."