Local hookah options expand
A place where people can legally smoke indoors now is open in Coralville.
Chicha Shack, a hookah lounge, opened Thursday at 89 Second St., in the shopping center next to the Heartland Inn.
This will be the third Chicha Shack location for owner Mohamed Ali, with the first opening in Ames in 2004 and a second in Des Moines.
Hookah bars are one of the places that fall under the Iowa Smokefree Air Act exceptions.
Passed in spring 2008, the Iowa Smokefree Air Act eliminated smoking in almost all public places, including restaurants and bars. To allow smoking, establishments must meet exceptions to the law. One exception is for establishments that generate at least 80 percent of revenue from tobacco sales. The other is for casinos.
People need to be 18 or older to smoke hookah and 21 or older to drink.
“It’s a great facility for everybody,” Ali said.
The hookah lounge also offers cable television, free wireless Internet and will host belly dancing events, he said. Ali said they will play a versatile mix of Middle Eastern, Indian and American music.
Until the end of September, the lounge will offer specials on beer and hookah as part of the grand opening celebration, Ali said.
The lounge offers more than 20 flavors of tobacco, including grape, strawberry, mint, melon and pineapple. A hookah is an ancient Middle Eastern water pipe used for smoking tobacco.
Smoking hookah is “a good experience,” Ali said. “It’s a different kind of experience.
“It smells good, it tastes good, it’s not harsh like cigarettes or cigars.”
If people don’t want to smoke hookah, they can come in and watch TV or play cards. They have 30 hookahs in the lounge, and Ali said he has 100 hookahs between his three locations.
According to a World Health Organization advisory note from 2005, waterpipe smoking, or hookah, is associated with many of the same risks as cigarette smoking. A typical one-hour session of water pipe smoking involves inhaling 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette, according to the advisory.
This is the second hookah lounge in the Iowa City area. The Red Poppy Tea & Hookah Parlour, located in downtown Iowa City, opened in 2005.
Ali said he chose Coralville “to be away from downtown, the big crowd.”
“I have my own crowd,” he said. “People will drive and target us.”
