Hookahs for Joplin?

12:51 Hookah Lounge brings the tradition to a new audience.

Smoking the hookah: Middle Easterners have done it for centuries. College students are doing it, and so are city dwellers from L.A. to Joplin to New York. Joplin? It’s been only a few months, but Adrian Gonzalez is pleased with how his business, 12:51 Hookah Lounge, has been received by Joplin’s young adults. The mostly twentysomethings who frequent 12:51 have their choice of several conversation areas, arranged with sleek and stylish futons and glass tables. The atmosphere Gonzalez has created is laid back.

“There needed to be something different than the usual bar scene,” he says. “I was tired of it in the first couple of weeks after coming back here.”
Gonzalez, 21, returned home to Joplin from Riverside, California, in order to be closer to his family. They’re closer than ever now as parents Joe and Margarita Gonzalez are in the hookah business with their son.

Margarita admits it took a while to warm up to her son’s business idea. “I had considered opening a business myself,” she says. “But I was thinking along the lines of a boutique.” Instead, she found herself researching the hookah, a Middle Eastern water pipe used for smoking tobacco and tobacco substitutes.
Hookah smoking has been practiced for 400 years as a social activity in Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries. It has recently gained popularity in the United States.

Some 12:51 Hookah Lounge hookahs have two hoses, allowing friends to share a bowl of flavored tobacco. The cost is $12 per hookah and additional bowls are available for $3 each.

Customers can choose from 20 flavored tobaccos, 10 herbal tobacco substitutes, soft drinks and snacks while enjoying a variety of entertainment that includes live music, flat-screen televisions and a PlayStation that rents by the hour. Individual hoses and mouthpieces can also be purchased.

Still, the Centers for Disease Control caution against hookah smoking, finding that a typical session involves inhaling 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled in a single cigarette and that sharing a hookah may increase the risk of transmission of tuberculosis, viruses such as herpes or hepatitis and other illnesses.

“We don’t tell people they have to smoke when they come in here,” Adrian says. “They can come and just listen to music and hang out with a soda and a candy bar. That’s fine with me, but for those who do smoke, this is an alternative.”

Wanna Go?

12:51 Hookah Lounge
3702 E. Seventh St., Joplin,
417-623-6666
Sun.–Thurs. 4 p.m.–midnight,
Fri.-Sat. 4 p.m.–3 a.m.

How a hookah works

To use a hookah, smokers fill a water bowl with warm water and submerge a metal body in it. A hose is attached to the top of the water bowl and at the other end is a mouthpiece. Moist tobacco is placed in the head and a charcoal is placed on top. When the charcoal is lit, the smoke passes through the water before being inhaled through the mouthpiece.