Wednesday night, a table of seven sat around a table at Mazaj Hookah Cafe at 190 Atwells Ave., with three hookahs in front of them burning blueberry, strawberry and watermelon flavored tobaccos. This is much much better than drinking too much.” “You can kill yourself by drinking too much. “You have choices, what you can do,” said Farahnaz Shobeiri, owner of Genie’s Hookah Lounge in Newport, which opened about five months ago. Burning anything creates toxins that are sucked into your lungs, causing damage. Once they’re smoking tobacco, she said, there’s a chance they will be addicted.Įven non-tobacco products are dangerous, Ragless added. Ragless said young people who might never consider smoking a cigarette are often drawn to the novelty of a hookah. (Joe Karam, owner of Opa, a Lebanese restaurant and hookah lounge at 244 Atwells Ave., disagreed with Ragless, saying some brands of hookah tobacco are processed to remove much of the nicotine and other toxins.) And anyone who believes that the water inside hookahs makes tobacco safer, she said, is wrong. Ragless said most hookah smokers are using tobacco, and the dangers of tobacco are well known. “We hate them,” said Tina Ragless, director of health promotion and public policy. When I want Italian food, am I going to go to McDonald’s, or am I going to an Italian restaurant?”įor the American Lung Association of Rhode Island, the kind of hookah bar doesn’t really matter. “Other people are just trying to add something to their menu.
You come in, you forget yourself where you are,” he said. Nara is undergoing expansion, with a new room featuring materials from Egypt, Turkey and Morocco. Makhlouf now has three hookah lounges in Rhode Island - Providence Byblos at 235 Meeting St., Nara at 248 Atwells Ave., and Jamra Hookah Lounge at 680 Admiral St. You come in, you think you’re in Lebanon.” “Our objective is to give people the whole experience - the food, the culture, the aroma. “It’s a whole cultural thing,” said Makhlouf, who came to the U.S. Georges Makhlouf, who started Providence Byblos on the East Side in 2005, said there’s nothing wrong with Sullivan’s offering hookahs to its customers.īut, he added, it’s not the true hookah experience. “There’s enough business for everybody,” said owner Eli Yazbeck. One of them, Skarr Hookah Lounge Bar & Grille at 292 Atwells Ave., opened just three weeks ago. Instead of burning out, the fad appears to have grown increasingly popular, with a half-dozen hookah lounges on Federal Hill alone. Hookah lounges arrived in Rhode Island in 2005. Hookahs, which are usually filled with flavored tobacco, have been around for centuries, beginning in India and migrating to the Arab world, where they became part of the café culture. … It’s one more thing to offer that you wouldn’t normally find in an Irish sports bar.” “We have a clientele we haven’t seen before. “It’s definitely helped our business on slow nights,” he said. Rizzo said it’s all about bringing in business during tough times. Inside, owner Mike Rizzo said he introduced hookahs, the ornate water pipes of Mideastern origin, about three weeks ago, filling them with a flavored non-tobacco product from a company called Zero Tobacco LLC. The sign outside of Sullivan’s Rhode, a bar and restaurant at 55 Union St., reads “WE HAVE HOOKAH.”
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