So you walk into a shop and eye a display case full of pipes and sweet, sticky tobacco.

You pay $10 for a bowl of strawberry-flavored stuff and plop down on a couch in another room to puff on it through a hookah, a water pipe. It might take 45 minutes.

Are you sampling or smoking?

That's what the city of St. Paul is trying to figure out as it takes a break from allowing new smoke shops -- especially those with hookahs -- into the city.

Officials say hookah lounges are an emerging business that uses the "guise of a tobacco shop offering 'sampling' of tobacco products" to get around Minnesota's smoking ban, which forbids smoking in most indoor places outside of a private home.

State law allows lighting up at shops that sell tobacco and related items for the "specific purpose of sampling tobacco products."

Question is, what constitutes sampling? The law doesn't say.

City Council Member Russ Stark, whose ward includes the four places city officials have identified as hookah lounges, says it appears the businesses are using a loophole. "We don't know the details of how these places work," he said.

Hookahs are prominent in Middle Eastern culture and have gained renewed popularity in recent years among college students and young adults elsewhere around the globe.

Some say it's a safer way to use tobacco because the water filters the smoke. Others, including the Mayo Clinic and World Health Organization, say hookah use is just as harmful -- if not more -- than smoking cigarettes.

The lounges operate with a retail tobacco shop license, although they can't offer sampling if they sell food or drinks. City officials also question whether something is really a shop if it's a place where people gather to hang out.

"We just don't know what to do with them," said Angie Wiese, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Safety and Inspections, which handles licensing.

In May, the City Council imposed a moratorium on any new tobacco shops, and on Wednesday it will introduce an interim ordinance that spells out the details. The moratorium expires next spring. Meanwhile, the city's Planning and Economic Development department will study the issue to see whether a new kind of license and zoning category needs to be created or whether stricter regulations should be put into place.

Current businesses won't be affected by the moratorium.

Part of the reason for the St. Paul study stems from health concerns, as well as complaints about noise and crowding outside some hookah lounges. "The complaints about the hookah bars aren't about the fact of their existence, but about behavioral concerns," Stark said.

Fartun Yusuf, who owns Lounge 280 near University Avenue and Raymond avenues, acknowledged that her establishment has drawn complaints and police officers, but she said she is hiring a guard and trying not to get on the city's bad side.

Minneapolis officials have had similar struggles with smoke shops and the definition of sampling, and they might conduct a study similar to St. Paul's, said Ricardo Cervantes, deputy director of licenses and consumer services.

"It's a gray area and needs to be better defined," he said. "It would be smart for both sides to be clear about what sampling is."

Chris Havens • 612-673-4148