From lunch until after midnight, the aroma of chicken shawarma, beef kebab, falafel, brick-oven baked bread and 80 flavors of tobacco drift through the air. It’s the scene on any given day at the Shisha Café, and the patrons come for the comfort food of their youths.

The newest clients come for tastes that they acquired much more recently, while stationed in Iraq during overseas military duty.

On a recent Sunday night, Airman Jessie Ross curled her legs in a chair, puffing on a hookah filled with watermelon mint-flavored smoke.

She sat alone, reading Stephenie Meyer’s “Eclipse,” rapt in the tale of young vampires as the aroma of meat kebabs and falafels drifted in the midnight air.

Ross brought her sister, an airman who served in Qatar, to the café she’s frequented for the past six years.

“I come here to smoke when I’ve had a bad day,” she says. “It’s a good stress reliever.”

Restaurant owner Abdulmajeed Al-Obaidi said his military customers began coming in 2004, lured by word of the Middle Eastern cuisine.

“I love it; it keeps me from being homesick,” Al-Obaidi says of re-creating a familiar surrounding from his homeland. “People in Baghdad like guests, they like to invite them for tea and make food, and we are very social people.”

They joined his regular customers — immigrants, college students from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the UT Health Science Center.

Majeed, originally from Baghdad, took over the restaurant in December 2003, after similar starts in New York and Michigan proved to be too expensive. He revamped the menu to include dishes similar to those served at his family cafés.

Shisha Café serves Middle East flavor to diverse clientele