HOOKAH SMOKE ON THE WATER

BLOORCOURT VILLAGE -- Jerome Klassen knows the score. The 27-year-old, bespectacled York University political science Ph.D.-hopeful spent his summer in Lebanon volunteering with Palestinian refugee camps. Now he's a weekly regular at the Beirut Palace and House of Wraps on Bloor near Dovercourt, a hookah bar where Jerome where he handles a hookah with ease.

"I got introduced to this stuff in Lebanon. Everybody smokes it down there," he says. "It's really relaxing and it tastes great." Klassen shuffles a puck of coal around the tinfoil-covered bowl. "I've never smoked cigarettes, but for some reason, I can handle the taste of this tobacco. I can't really handle cigarette smoke."

A typical hookah stands about one and a half feet tall with a water-filled glass chamber as its base and ornately styled brass making up the cylindrical body. It's basically a big water bong: you wrap your lips around the mouthpiece of a rubber hose and suck smoke first into the chamber and then into your lungs. It's a lot more fun than cigarettes. The taste is damn fine, too. Beirut Palace carries three different types of tobacco in three different flavours that patrons can smoke from hookas, all of it imported from Lebanon, with fruit shavings mixed in by owner Karim Sabra.

One bowl costs $8 to $10 and takes nearly an hour to smoke on the shaded patio. Palace patrons while away sunny afternoons beneath the blue roof and yellow parasols, lush ivies twisting from pots hanging overhead, handmade brass and glass hookahs filling with thick, creamy smoke on the ground by their feet.

Sabra brought all 25 of his hookahs and many accessory items over from Lebanon. A shy man of few words, his face crackles with pride when he speaks of his prized piece: a mammoth, double-hosed shisha pipe that holds two litres of water and sits on a mantle behind the bar. You can just picture the row of rinky-dink potheads sipping their $2.75 beers and staring forlornly over the bar at last call. "It's the most expensive hookah in all of Canada," Sabra says with a wink. PAUL CARLUCCI