Orange County city cites noise, drugs in regulating hookah bars

BY. GILLIAN FLACCUS

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Mohammed Elkhatib surveyed his cafe and shook his head - no belly dancers, no live music, no dance floor. Just a handful of clean-cut men sitting around puffing tobacco from hookahs and watching Game 3 of the World Series.

Business isn't likely to pick up anytime soon. After fielding hundreds of complaints from angry residents, the City Council on Tuesday night tentatively approved an ordinance targeting the 11 hookah bars that have popped up along the city's Little Gaza strip in the past five years.

If it wins final approval next month, the new law will ban drinking, live music and dancing - including belly dancing - at the bars unless owners secure a special permit.

City officials see the new law as an administrative solution that will let them better regulate the thriving lounges much as they do other businesses. Owners of the hookah bars, however, see something bigger: a culture clash in a city that until recent years was known as the predominantly white home of Disneyland.

"You just limited our business to Starbucks," said Elkhatib, a 26-year-old Kuwaiti-American. "We're not Starbucks - we're a Middle Eastern hookah bar. We dance, we sing, we come together to celebrate. I don't think it's fair what they're doing."

Elkhatib's Fusion Cafe is one of many hookah bars around the country where young Arab-Americans and others gather to smoke flavored tobacco from the elaborate water pipes. But few have stirred as much controversy as those in Anaheim.

City officials deny they are attacking the Middle Eastern tradition and insist that some hookah lounges have blatantly exploited a loophole in the city code to act as unregulated clubs and bars in residential areas.

In the past two years, police have responded 499 times to disturbances around the clubs involving drunkenness, gang fights, theft, arson and drug use.

Angry lounge owners fear the new rules will put them out of business and deal a blow to the thriving young Arab-American community that uses the cafes as social cornerstones.

"The average American will go to a bar after work, have a drink and call it a day. Well, that's exactly what this is," Elkhatib said. "We're not doing anything against our culture."

The hookah cafes in Anaheim began to open five years ago, when young Arab-American entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to take a long-standing Middle Eastern tradition and give it a modern American twist.

The lounges styled themselves as hip new clubs, with muted lighting, live music and belly dancers to entertain customers while they sucked in tobacco tasting of grape, watermelon and strawberry.

That trend has crossed the nation, with hookah bars attracting Arab and non-Arab college students and twentysomethings from California to North Carolina and Wisconsin.

In Anaheim, nearly all the lounges are located within a highly competitive two-mile radius.

Elkhatib and others say less scrupulous owners have admitted minors, served alcohol without a license and looked the other way at drug use to attract non-Arab customers. The tactics have hurt the reputation of an important part of Middle Eastern culture, Elkhatib said.

On a recent night at the Fusion Cafe, tucked between Al Huda Meat and Arja Pastry, a dozen baby-faced men puffed on hookahs and played a card game called tarneeb. Most said they came daily to hang out with friends they've known since childhood.

"It's like a second home to us. It's our comfort zone," Amer El Hatem, 19, said as he puffed grape-flavored tobacco from a blue water pipe painted with intricate flowers. "I don't know why they're putting restrictions on us."

The city says the establishments have outgrown city codes that treated them like coffee houses. Lounges that want to offer live music or dancing can apply for a more expensive permit that's required of clubs, bars, dance halls and many restaurants, said Sheri Vander Dussen, city planning director.

Some residents who have battled the hookah bars wanted the new regulations to be more restrictive. They dismissed suggestions by lounge owners that their complaints were motivated by racism or cultural insensitivity.

Vanessa Shanley fought for 14 months to get a hookah lounge behind her house closed after it became the scene of gang fights, shootings and drunkenness. The bar was shut down a year ago after Shanley videotaped the problems from her backyard, she said.

"Now it's in someone else's yard," said Shanley, who brought her teenage daughter to the City Council meeting. "Putting a hookah bar in our residential neighborhood puts our children in danger."

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