Hookah Lounges In Northern Cali.

[boulderkid303]

Hey everyone-

Anybody know of any good Hookah lounges in San Francisco (bay area), I will be up there in a few days and would love to know of a few. Right now I'm looking at Kan Zaman.

[stryet]

Stogies @ the Pacific East Mall in El Cerrito (3288 Pierce St. #B108). The guy who owns it also owns Whelan's Smoke Shop in Berkeley and is pretty cool. I've never kicked it there personally (i'm cheap) but Whelan's house blends are really good.

Cover charge includes unlimited bowls. They also got pool tables and a DJ spinning hip hop and middle eastern music. If you check it out, or anyone else has, let me know how it is.

[nestormakhno]

Stogies @ the Pacific East Mall in El Cerrito (3288 Pierce St. #B108). The guy who owns it also owns Whelan's Smoke Shop in Berkeley and is pretty cool. I've never kicked it there personally (i'm cheap) but Whelan's house blends are really good.

Cover charge includes unlimited bowls. They also got pool tables and a DJ spinning hip hop and middle eastern music. If you check it out, or anyone else has, let me know how it is.

lol, don't take this as a personal attack, but none of what's written above is true. Stogies is a little hole-in-the-wall inside of a Korean mall or something like that. The cover charge is $10, I believe, for two badly-packed bowls. You get unlimited coals, though, which makes me feel oh-so-special.

The seating is, predictably, horrid. This place is an insult to the entire concept of comfort. There are two types of seats: benches along the wall, which are about a foot, maybe foot-and-a-half in width, with one-inch pillows on top, and your back is pretty much squeezed into the wall the entire time. Forget the word "lounge" in "hookah lounge." The other type of chair is a stool, also small, also wooden, also uncomfortable as hell. The tables are low and long, so you most likely will be seated with other people.

For about thirty seconds, I thought the place looked quaint. But then it happened.

First of all, the lazy-ass staff was sitting around watching baseball on the TV right above our heads, so my friends and I, despite being the only people in that shithole, couldn't even talk to each other. Service was impossibly slow and horrible (come on, it does NOT take that long to pack a bowl). Yeah, there were pool tables. And a jukebox. And speakers right next to my ear.

But here was the clincher: whoever the motley fool is who owns this egregious establishment allows smoking inside. There is almost no air flow, which is okay for hookah, because the smoke isn't even that dense (how could it be, when the bowls are this undrepacked?), but cigarette smoke was too much. Then, this "DJ" showed up, set up his shit next to my brain, because the room is so small that the speakers occupy a fourth of the room. I got a massive headache within minutes. We smoked the first bowl for about half an hour, then a bunch of teenagers were seated at our table, then I decided to go out into the lobby for a bit, because my brain was swelling, and after half an hour of talking to the coal guy, who was lighting the coals with something that looked like an enlarged crack torch, my friends and I left.

Overall, it was the worst hookah bar experience I have ever had, bar none. It also tops the list for Stupidest Establishment Design, what with the awful chairs and the loud speakers for such a tiny place. If you want to purchase yourself a headache, you don't have to pay $10 for it and sit through two bowls of crap. Simply hit your head against the wall at home, which I wanted to do after I left, anyway.

Teehee. On that note, no, I don't know any good hookah bars up in the Bay. Ask Pimpito. He lives around there somewhere. Edited August 10, 2007 by nestormakhno

[Calcartman]

Is this hookah-hut?
I know whelans, and its a decent shop, but the "house blends" are, and always have been, fumari.

[Calcartman]

If you're up in the east bay (Danville, more specifically) we have a place called the Pride of the Meditteranean (sp?), in blackhawk plaza. They serve hookahs, and very very good middle-eastern food.
Their hookahs come in 13, 17, and 25$ options. the cheap ones are your choice of strawberry or double apple, and the bottom one smokes terribly.
If you go, get the "sharky" hookah. Talk to sharky (the owner, not his real name), and ask for either the blackhawk blend, or the playboy. Its pricey but its really good.

He also owns a restaurant on fillmore street in san francisco, but ive never been there.