Where there is smoke, there's probably a popular lounge modeled after a Middle Eastern tobacco tradition

Friday, August 19, 2005 - By JODI LEE REIFER - STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE

After sunset, the genie busts out of his proverbial bottle at Layaly Cafe.

And he's not just blowing smoke.

Like the slouching 20-somethings in the bamboo chairs outside the Greenridge storefront, the crimson creature painted on the wall puffs fruit-flavored tobacco from a hookah.

A Middle Eastern pipe equipped with a long tube passing through an urn of water to cool the smoke as it is drawn through, today's hookah traces its origins to Turkey, where it became an integral part of coffeehouse culture about 500 years ago.

Half a millennium later, hookah lounges are hot in America. Between 200 and 300 have opened in this country in the last six years, often near college campuses, according to Smokeshop Magazine.

"Every day we receive two to three e-mails or phone calls from people wanting people to open a hookah lounge," said Abrahim Nadimi, co-owner of Social Smoke, an Arlington, Texas-based wholesaler who supplies upwards of 400 smoke shops across the country.

In New York, there are about 20 hookah bars in the East Village, Brooklyn and Queens.

Since opening in January, Layaly Cafe, a bright evening-hours outpost, has brought Staten Island onto the scene.

"It's better than just hanging out in a regular bar," says Tom Cuccia, 22, a pharmacy technician from Annadale, smoking cherry tobacco on a Thursday night at 11. "It's addicting -- the atmosphere."

Addiction -- yes, there's the rub.

Hookah smoking lounges are not excused from the city's 2-year-old smoking ban in public places, unless the city granted them a tobacco bar exemption. And it's no longer possible to secure one.

"To be registered as such, (hookah lounges) must have been in existence on Dec. 31, 2001" said Eric Riley, a spokesman for the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the agency that enforces the smoking ban. However, a venue such as the Layaly Cafe may legally allow smoking if it holds a retail tobacco license and only serves tobacco, said Riley.

The Greenridge business strictly sells tobacco, but the city Department of Consumer Affairs does not have a license on record for the Layaly Cafe, said spokeswoman Dina Improta.

Co-owner Ray Ramadan maintains all of his paperwork is in order.

Still, even facing hazy legal issues, hookah cafe owners are not deterred from operating.

They have other concerns.

In these post-London bombing days when fear of anti-Arab backlash is heightened, hookah lounges are taking a risk merely by opening. And Layaly Cafe has taken up residence in a borough where the masses are often painted as narrow-minded.

"People warned me a million times about that. They said, 'There's not too many Arabs here. You're going to suffer,' -- which really I did, when I opened," says Ramadan, 52, a native of Giza, Egypt, who immigrated to New York in 1979 to seek "opportunity."

In those early winter months, the place was empty.

Eight months later, spikey-haired college students and young professionals who pride themselves on needing little sleep, swarm the place weeknights and weekends. Some of them are cigarette-smokers. Others are not.

Ray, as his customers call him, is a slight man with a thin mustache who carries himself with the charisma befitting a mono-monikered celebrity. For 10 years, the former cabbie managed Mike's Place diners across the borough. He hugs his patrons good-bye and prides himself on the open atmosphere he strives to create.

"I want everybody. I have Russian, Lebanese, Ukrainian, Albanian, from all over the world, Italian," he says breathlessly. "I have like a United Nations here. A small United Nations."

He and his partner, Aziz Fam, decided to open their place -- which does not usually serve food -- because they kept bumping into Staten Islanders in Brooklyn and New Jersey hookah bars.

Ray, the hands-on partner, discourages political talk, but the confluence of cultures at Layaly Cafe is not lost on repeat customers.

Roman Prager, 22, who used to frequent lounges in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, said the cafe, slipped into a small shopping plaza on the wooded curves on Arthur Kill Road, radiates a different vibe.

"Most of the hookah bars -- they're all Jewish, all Christian or all Arabs. This place kind of breaks down the barriers," said Prager, a Dongan Hills medical student, who plays cards or backgammon four times a week at Layaly.

As Ray does with all of the male regulars he knows by first name, the owner calls Prager and his brother, Dmitry Shamis, "ugly." He asks their female friends why they hang with such "ugly" companions.

But the steadies hardly mind.

"Ray makes every night entertaining. He's the soul of this place. He looks at everyone like family," said Shamis, 18, a freshman at New York University.

Customers at other tables smoking apple-, apricot- banana- and cantaloupe-flavored tobacco say the draw is the inexpensive cost. For $5, one person can usually smoke for 45 minutes. At an alcohol-serving bar, scenesters could easily burn through at least four times as much money in the same period.

For others, the draw is simply the low-key attitude of the place.

"It's not filled with 16-year-old kids who are intellectually void," said Maureen Wojciechowski, a 23-year-old from West Brighton wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase "Chillin' like a villain." "It's not Applebee's or Chili's."