It was only about a month since Mike Pasquini opened a hookah lounge in rallying downtown Wilkes-Barre when the then 26 year-old walked to the back of his shop to get something. As he opened the door to return to the front of house, he stared at the capacity crowd when it hit him.
“I made this place,” thought Pasquini, a Wikes-Barre native and son of local business leader Frank Pasquini. The place was jammed, and Pasquini had to actually turn people away.
Indeed, Pasquini made something that Wilkes-Barre, increasingly recognized as a thriving college town, sorely needed: a place for young people over 18 to hang out, maybe listen to music, indulge in some fancy smoke — all without the riff-raff often found at college bar hangouts.
A year since opening the Crimson Lion on East South St., business is booming and Pasquini is expanding, taking his hookah act to nearby Bloomsburg, a classic PA college town. The new place, set to open Aug. 25, will share the Crimson Lion name and product offerings and coincidentally will be located at 37 E. Main St. (the flagship in Wilkes-Barre is at 37 E. South St.), but that’s where the similarities end.
Wilkes-Barre is home to about 4,000 college students downtown between Wilkes University and King’s College, Pasquini’s alma mater, and the Crimson is on a side street. In its new Columbia County location, the Crimson will be on a main street with 10,000 Bloomsburg University students within smoking distance. The new space is roughly three times the size of the Wilkes-Barre layout, including a spacious loft tailor-made for entertainment. As a result, there will be even more live music at the Bloomsburg Crimson Lion, and separate spaces sprinkled throughout the new space will allow for more private parties and for local artisans to sell their wares.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” says Pasquini.
The thought of expansion had crossed Pasquini’s mind, and a customer interested in investing started talking about the possibility of doing it in Hazleton. Around the same time, a couple of Pasquini’s frends were trying to open a cafe at a location they found in Bloomsburg. When their efforts stalled, Pasquini was brought in to get the project moving. With the aforementioned customer as a silent partner, Pasquini will own the new iteration of the Crimson and his friends will run the joint.
A defining characteristic of the Bloomsburg lounge is its authentic tin ceiling, which Pasquini had painted metallic gold: “It ties the whole place together,” he says.
Pasquini, who last year cited the success of other hookah lounges in PA as one of his motivations to open his first establishment, says he will look at other possible locations down the road, so it’s a safe bet that his hookah empire will expand sometime in the not-so-distant future.
“I have a consistent demographic, split between people who are local and coming home from school and people (who live elsewhere) coming here for school,” says Pasquini. “It’s one of the benefits of being in a college town.”
JOE PETRUCCI is managing editor of Keystone Edge. Send feedback here.