Three Long Beach hookah bars in one night

EXHALE’S HOOKAH WALL by ROSHEILA ROBLES

I’m too stuck-up for chewing tobacco, too reformed for hits from a bong, and cigarettes make my fingertips reek. Plus, there’s the guilt—the lowdown-dirty-smoker shame. But that all vanishes when I smoke hookah. Inhaling honey-steeped shisha from a hand-blown Egyptian water pipe feels sophisticated and sensual, less like the blanched anti-smoking ad lady who takes drags from a hole in her throat and more like Josephine Baker in Paris. Except I’m beneath a canvas canopy outside the Mirage Coffee House in Bixby Knolls. And I’m not topless.

The Mirage is the latest hookah lounge to offer sanctuary to outcast weekend smokers like me in Long Beach, a city that beat California to the punch at outlawing smoking in bars, and just about every other place—even our toxic beaches. Every bit as much a dining establishment as it is a hookah lounge, Mirage owners Mike and Alex Nabulsi prepare everything on their college-budget-priced menu of Middle Eastern fundamentals on-site, including brilliant baklava. There’s also free wi-fi, satellite TV, open mic Fridays and live indie music and performance art from the likes of the Fallopian Artopians, an all-girl collaborative painting troupe.

And so, the ritual begins. A thigh-high hookah arrives alongside twin pumpkin spice lattes. Mike slides two vacuum-packed plastic disposable mouthpieces onto the patio table and disappears. He returns clutching a charcoal basin that looks like a jumbo steel pasta strainer modified with an obscenely long handle. He then carefully swings the basin from side to side, stoking the coals to red-hot. The heat warms my ankles.

Four lumps of charcoal clink onto the tin-foil-wrapped mouth of our single-hose hookah. For $10, (citywide, “regular” shisha ranges between $10 and $12 per hookah session; add about $2 for “exotic” grade shisha; and around $5 for refills), a friend and I take turns channeling Lewis Carroll’s “languid, sleepy” blue caterpillar for an hour, easy. We’re boysenberry buzzed, but it’s time to move on to the next cloud.

At Exhale Café a lip-biting blonde girl who looks barely old enough to be here (18 by law) cards us at the entrance. We enter and find a pool table, dartboard and shelves of elaborate imported hookahs for sale. Evidently there are three reasons to Exhale: 1) to see, 2) to be seen, and 3) to smoke copious amounts of Starbuzz-brand shisha until your mouth tastes like the inside of a candy jar. We puffed an hour of mild mint chocolate, as recommended by a Cal State Long Beach senior the next sofa over. She says she hangs out here “like, every day.” Makes sense: Exhale is owned and operated by Iraqi-American CSULB students, who give their fellow coeds an $8 discount on Wednesdays.

The drill at Exhale is cut and dried. Pick a couch under the massive blue awning outside. Pick a shisha flavor (smokeable choices that are as fun to inhale as they are to say: J-Lo Surprise; Pomegasm; Pine Street—“all the flash for half the cash”; Kiwi Herman—“it’ll make you want to strip down at the theatre”). Pick up your hookah hose and smoke. One drawback: Exhale’s candlelit boudoir ambiance would be dead-on if not for the music. Bobby Brown’s prerogative has never been mine, and it won’t ever be.

The last stop on our hookah lounge crawl is Aladdin Grill & Café on Pine Avenue, but neither of us can hack another puff. We agree to forgo the smoke this time around (though Aladdin’s hookah menu lists 21 flavors) and indulge in a second dinner instead (bitter feta, imported kalamata olives, crisp falafel cakes, garlic dipping sauce and smoky hummus), followed by a tasteful belly dancing show. The best part is the drinks: choose from toot, a refreshing Lebanese mulberry beverage; Armenian laban, a cooling drinkable yogurt; or jallab, a syrupy thirst quencher flavored with dates, grapes and rose water.

It’s now 10 o’clock on a Saturday night and there’s only one couple smoking hookah. They seem out of place exhaling plumes of smoke within elbowroom of the other patio diners. Yet I can sense why they came here: surrounded by Andalusian rugs, silky gold brocade pillows, and stained glass Moroccan lanterns, our upscale Middle Eastern cuisine experience alone was worth the trip. I’ll definitely be back for a visit here—just as soon as the smoke clears from my lungs.

ALADDIN CAFE 200 PINE AVE | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.951.1200 EXHALE CAFE 674 REDONDO AVE | LONG BEACH 90814 | 562.434.6799 MIRAGE COFFEE HOUSE 549 E BIXBY RD | LONG BEACH 90807

Tags: aladdin, exhale, hookah, Long Beach, mirage