Do you hookah?

When Bangkok Cuisine shut down its hookah lounge, Cory Guzman jumped on the opportunity to offer hookah services without any competition. He started Little Gray Rabbit Hookahs with his friend Bryan Tyner. Little Gray is a hookah rental service that offers hookah pipes and the accompanying flavored tobacco to, really, whoever wants to hookah. For more information or to book your own hookah party, call 250-0316 or e-mail hookahs@littlegrayrabbit.com.

Tell me what Little Gray Rabbit Hookahs does.

Well, Alice in Wonderland is the easiest way to explain the hookah. People associate it with the caterpillar who smokes a hookah. It’s like a water pipe, and you smoke flavored tobacco out of it. What we offer is a full-service hookah lounge. We are mobile, so we go to the bars and establishments and basically pitch our services to them, and then they hire us to come on evenings or whenever they have events going on.

Where in town are you going right now?

Right now, we do Transitions at Lime on Friday nights, and then Monday nights there’s the House of Sin at the Blue Lamp, which is an industrial gothic night. We’re talking to a couple of other bars, like the Satellite. Then, we also do private parties. So we’ll go to your house, and you can smoke there, too.

Is the Reno community becoming more hookah savvy?

Reno’s behind sometimes on some things like this. It’s been pretty big in most major cities for about three or four years. … By the end of next month, there will probably be five different hookah lounges operating throughout the city. So Reno is definitely catching on now.

So, ideally, would you like to go out seven nights a week to different clubs and parties?

If I could maintain that kind of schedule, yeah, that would eventually be the plan—to be booked up solid.

Once the novelty wears off, what’s the appeal for people to keep doing it?

It’s just fun. It’s very social. You know, you can get three or four or five of your friends around and just hang out at the bar. A lot of people, once they’ve tried it, really enjoy it.

How many flavors of tobacco do you offer?

We have about 20, and then those can be mixed and matched. Then there are other things, like we run specials where you can add stuff to the base that alters the flavors. Then you can put booze in the bottom, too.

Do you use the hookah often yourself? What’s your favorite flavor?

I own three hookahs personally, so it’s definitely something that I have, for better or for worse, gotten into. … I like orange mint. Sweet melon’s really tasty. Cappuccino.

For people who don’t know, how is the flavor?

It’s really smooth. I haven’t really smoked cigarettes—I’ve just taken a drag here and there, and cigarettes aren’t very tasty. You can’t taste the tobacco [in hookah] as far as I understand. It’s very smooth, and just a pretty solid flavor of whatever particular flavor you’re smoking.

So for somebody who has never smoked cigarettes, this wouldn’t make them cough and hack?

No, not at all. It’s an extremely smooth smoke.

Where do you get your hookahs?

Ours were imported from Jordan. But if people are interested, they can go down to Art Dogs & Grace, and they have a lot of them there.

Are you becoming kind of a connoisseur as far as mixing different flavors and coming up with the perfect taste?

Yeah, I’ve got it figured out.