Review: The Hookah Café

By Luna Meilekh

It all began with a dream of two young friends: Mohammad Abu-Sherbi, 19, and Joey Landes, 21: “We were sitting at Starbucks smoking hookah and then they came and kicked us out, so we decided to open our own place,” says Abu-Sherbi.

Two years (and a lot of hard work) later, this dream came true in the form of the Hookah Café in Wichita.
A hookah is a water pipe device for smoking herbal fruits. It originated in India and nowadays it’s prevalent in Arab countries, where families gather around a hookah, as western families gather around a TV set.
The Hookah Café offers approximately 20 different flavors, like peach, strawberry, kiwi and vanilla. Otherwise, the menu is very minimalistic: a couple of cold and worm drinks for very accessible prices of 1-2 dollars.
Since Abu-Sherbi isn’t 21 yet, the café isn’t allowed to sell any alcoholic beverages, so one must be only 18 to enter. That’s also the way they want to keep it: “It gives younger kids an opportunity to hang out and not to get wasted” said one of the guests.
In order to find out more about the Hookah Cafe, which just opened on the 9th of February, I and a couple of friends decided to dedicate our Friday evening to this place.
When we arrived we were told that the waiting time was one hour--the average waiting time on weekends. But when we started walking to the car Abu-Sherbi came running towards us and said that there’s a free couch we could sit on.
He himself accompanied us to our seats and made sure we had everything we needed adding that, for the future, “the best way to do it is to make reservations.”
We decided to try watermelon flavored tobacco, which turned out to be a good decision for all of us. The waiter came by very often to make sure that our coffee cups were full to the brim and that the charcoals of the hookah were fiercely burning.
The only thing we were missing was a spoon to stir our coffee. But then I remembered that I just happened to have one in my purse. (I guess girls do carry their whole household in their purses!)
The visitors of the café are very diverse: “old people, young people- everyone wants to try it,” says Abu-Sherbi. They are also very multicultural; many of them are of Middle Eastern descent.
Though I expected to hear lounge music- the usual music in hookah cafes- the DJ (yes, there was a DJ in there) surprised us with loud dance music.
After he left we were offered the best of traditional Arabic music, and some guys from the table nearby even insisted on demonstrating us some traditional Arabic ‘shake your booty’ moves.
In the end, the flowing conversation, the delicious watermelon taste and the check (20 dollars for all five of us together- including tip) left a sweet taste in our mouth.