If you ever feel need to suck and puff with a booth full of good friends, you’re in luck because Richmond is getting hooked on hookahs.

To the Turks, it’s a “chichi.“ The Lebanese call it a “nargile.“ And if you ask Richmonders along Laurel and Broad Streets, it’s a recipe for one hell of a good time. Aladdin Express, a popular joint nestled between VCU’s ever sprawling campus, boasts everyone’s favorite bubbler - the hookah, many well over three-feet in height. Emerging from the kitchen with a smile, Al Alhomsi, manager at Aladdin, plops a brick of specialty blended tobacco onto a wooden table.

“We make our own - the Aladdin Mix,“ he oozes, four golden hookahs glistening behind him. Unwrapping a mass of aluminum foil with pride, scents of rosewood, jasmine, lemon, and orange fill the tiny eatery. The hour is early, yet by nightfall Alhomsi admits that his lounge will soon be filled with sweet smoke, and the faint gurgle of the hubbly-bubbly.

For centuries, hookahs have been used to inhale fruity tobacco blends - and at times other natural little wonders. Now enjoying a whiff of mainstream popularity, local hangouts like Aladdin Express, are enticing Richmonders to take a puff and enjoy the taste of a different world. And on Friday and Saturday nights, this spells a packed house - as every table is complete with relaxed patrons, hookah in hand.

According to Brennan Appel, president of the Hookah Brothers supply chain, 200 to 300 of these sweet, yet musky-smelling, cafes started in California and spread to cities such as Chicago, New York, and Seattle a handful of years ago. Similar to the oxygen bar and martini lounge fad, he says culture mavens now flock to hookah hangouts to socialize, sample Turkish coffee, and puff on a full menu of imported tobacco. Here in Richmond among the dimly lit booths at Aladdin Express, customers of all ages, cultures, and socio-economic levels share in the fragrant smoke - choosing between mint, strawberry, cantaloupe, rose, apricot, and even cappuccino.

With a thread-covered hose, happy smokers draw air through a tobacco-flake and molasses mixture, down the body of the powerful glass hookah, into water at its base, and finally into their mouths. Over twenty of these ancient pipes, with gilded accents, are available for rent at Aladdin’s, complete with disposable mouthpiece tips for sanitation sake. Wait staff at the restaurant are quick to check IDs (smoke nuts must be 18) and tend to the tobacco, making sure guests never have to light the bowl, which blazes with specialty charcoal from Holland. Heck, they even toss in some Nammaourah - a homemade specialty desert, chock full of almonds and honey.

Lain dusty for years, hookahs are not only enjoying a place on the menu at Aladdin Express, but also popping up among the ever increasing competition from only blocks away.

“Later at night, pretty much everybody who walks in the door will be smoking a hookah,“ smiles Mark Jillson, an employee of nearby Sahara, a one-year-old Mediterranean restaurant on West Grace Street. Jillson admits the competition is fierce, but his former fast food restaurant turned hookah stomping grounds now packs the house with ease. With a bar that literally glows, this college hotspot displays a host of hookahs along the top shelf as if they were objet d’art - complete with colorful glass and intricate finials.