Bowling Green resident Semir Bahic exhales cherry coke flavored smoke from a hookah at the Saharan Lounge on Tuesday, Nov. 3. TANNER CURTIS/HERALD

The Saharan Lounge overwhelms the senses with the strong smell of perfumed incense and hookah.

The smoking lounge is covered in Moroccan-themed draperies and a mix of Middle Eastern music and Top 40 radio hits play from the speakers. The Saharan Lounge, 1244 US 31-W Bypass, is a hookah bar that opened on Oct. 16.

Atlanta Freshman Renee Thomas was used to hanging out at hookah bars in her hometown. She said she didn’t expect Bowling Green to have a local place for her when she began her college career at Western this fall.

Thomas said she heard from a friend that a new hookah bar was opening in Bowling Green and immediately went to check it out.

“I’ve been there a few times already,” Thomas said. “Hookah bars are really low pressure environments. Nobody’s trying to impress anybody. It’s just a place to relax and have fun.”

Seattle senior James Huntsberry is the co-owner of The Saharan Lounge. He said that word-of-mouth has kept a steady stream of customers coming to his business.

“We haven’t done any advertising so far,” Huntsberry said. “We want to get into marketing, but business without it has still been really strong.”

Huntsberry co-owns The Saharan Lounge with Tedde Harden, a graduate student from Otisville, N.Y.

“We wanted to give Bowling Green something interesting,” Harden said. “There are a lot of the same kinds of places here and we wanted something different.”

He said hookah is a water-based pipe used to smoke flavored tobacco. It was created in India after the European colonies brought tobacco plants there.

Huntsberry said he and Harden met at one of his hookah retailing parties in 2007. Huntsberry said he was trying to discover ways to market hookah in Bowling Green through these parties when the two became friends. Over the next few months, they ran through ideas about how to make a hookah business successful based on Huntsberry’s findings.

Huntsberry said he noticed that many students that are too young to go to bars and needed an inexpensive and safe nightlife option in Bowling Green.

He said that the lounge offers “all-you-can-smoke” hookah for $7 per person and assorted beverages. They offer two brands of hookah tobacco, Layalina and Al Fakher. Different flavors include mango, strawberry and fruit punch.

Huntsberry said the lounge’s customers are mostly college students and people in their early to mid-twenties.

“Some of our best customers are the Saudi Arabian population of Bowling Green,” Huntsberry said. “They helped us start out with picking the music and the look.”

He said he and Harden want to focus on expansion of the business.

“We hope to turn this into a three-section business,” Huntsberry said. “We want it to be part restaurant, part wet bar and, of course, part smoking lounge.”

They also hope to give back to the community and hire employees, he said.

“We really want to create jobs for students that fit with their class schedules,” Huntsberry said. “It’s hard to find that in any other place besides a bar. We also just want to put faith into the struggling economy.”

The Saharan Lounge is open Monday through Saturday from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. or later.

“You can do your homework here and relax and hang out in a social environment,” Huntsberry said. “It’s a very comfortable place.”