The yuppie-hipsters of Manhattan are smoking in defiance of the New York City ban on lighting up in bars and restaurants. Every week, thousands go to hookah lounges to puff fruit- and spice-flavoured tobacco from giant Middle-Eastern-style pipes. The tobacco is heated on a bed of glowing charcoal and the smoke cools as it gurgles through water in the pipe's bulb, mellowing the flavour before it hits the mouth.
Hookah bars were once found only in small enclaves of residents from the Middle East, in particular Egyptians, on a few streets in Queens and Brooklyn. These establishments often don't serve alcohol, focusing instead on tobacco and tea. Their clientele is male and tends to be older, in keeping with the more traditional culture of the hookah pipe.
But in the past year or so, a different kind of hookah craze has swept college cities and towns in the United States: in New York, that means the area within a few kilometres of New York University. It has taken over parts of the trendy Lower East Side of Manhattan to such an extent that you can now go on a hookah lounge crawl - puffing tobacco in more than half a dozen places within a 20-minute walk.
The customers are young, often women. The music is techno and the beer flows freely. Bar snacks are plentiful, if not exactly cheap. Belly dancing and karaoke dominate at weekends, when the sweet vapours float around until the early hours of the morning.
New York's traditional bars have all had to force their customers onto the pavements to smoke their cancer sticks. But the hookah lounges believe they can qualify as 'tobacco bars' - a loophole in the anti-smoking law that has allowed some cigar bars to continue to exist since the smoking ban was enacted in March 2003 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. To qualify, a bar must derive at least 10 per cent of its income from the sale or rental of tobacco products and devices, and it must get more of its income from alcoholic beverages than from food.
The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, however, may be ready to pour cold water on the fad. A spokesman said that only eight New York bars are actually registered as tobacco bars, and none of them are hookahs. 'All others are operating illegally and we will continue to investigate,' he said.