On Friday night last week, the doorman at the X Lounge, the chic bar/restaurant in the Glass Building just off the Downtown Mall, made a questionable call concerning a turban wearing Sikh student from UVA.

According to a story that first appeared in the Cavalier Daily, at around 1:30am, the Sikh student tried to join fellow members of UVA’s Indian Student Association at the restaurant for a nightcap, but was told by the doorman that he couldn’t go in “with that thing on.”

Apparently, the ISA’s president tried to reason with the X Lounge’s manager, explaining that it was a requirement of the student’s faith, but the manager stuck to the restaurant’s no head wear policy, a decision that X Lounge owner J.F. Legault now regrets.

Legault declined to make any comments for the record, preferring instead to address the issue in a prepared statement.

“Our most sincere apologies go out the individual, his companions and the entire community,” reads the statement. “The X Lounge has a “no head covering” policy and at times this policy has created difficult situations. In this case, there was a lack of common sense on our part and respect to one’s religion did not prevail.”

Indeed, in a city where someone of the Sikh faith sits on our City Council, the gaffe appears particularly void of common sense. The statement doesn’t explain why the X Lounge has a no head wear policy, and Legault wasn’t willing to elaborate. As you may recall, the owners of the Corner restaurant Jaberwoke, which re-opened as Three-a Kitchen and Lounge, got in some hot-water over a dress code that banned white t-shirts, oversized t-shirts, baggy jeans, sweatpants, and hats without brims– in other words, the threads of choice of hip-hop music fans.

Like the X Lounge incident, furor over the Jaberwoke policy was the result of a story in the Cavalier Daily, which prompted student organizations to demand a meeting with the restaurant’s owners. Nearly 50 students, most of them African American, showed up for the two-hour discussion.

A month earlier, Jaberwoke’s owners explained that the dress code was being implemented to encourage “better behavior” among its patrons.

“It ain’t dress; it’s race,” declared an outraged Rick Turner, local NAACP president and UVA’s former Dean of African American Affairs during the meeting. “You really don’t want black people in your bar.”

After being peppered with such comments, Jaberwoke’s owners offered to change the dress code on the spot. But the crowd wasn’t easily appeased.

“I don’t understand why you need a dress code at all,” said one student.

The X Lounge incident appears to have elicited a similar reaction from the ISA. While Indian student representatives appeared to welcome Legault’s apology, they declared it wasn’t enough and demanded that the X Lounge’s policy on head wear be changed, that the manager be punished, and that the X Lounge explain specifically how they planned to prevent such incidents from happening again.

Even UVA spokesperson Carol Wood got in on the action, saying it “shows that there are still people in our community who do not understand the basic tenants of our country.” Ouch!

In his statement, Legault says that steps will be taken at the X Lounge to make sure nothing like this ever happens again, but did not say if the head wear policy would be reconsidered or altered.

However, the student group is now adopting a more diplomatic approach. In a joint statement received today, the Sikh Student Association and Indian Student Association at UVA informed the Hook that they plan on meeting with representatives from the X Lounge next week to discuss the incident.

“We appreciate the apology from X Lounge and hope they can elaborate on their course of action at this meeting,” the statement reads. ” We would like to utilize this incident to educate the community about minority culture rather than to incur punishment on X Lounge.

“Incidents like this do happen often, even if they go unreported,” the statement continued. “We do not plan on protesting X Lounge’s policy, as it has been written to allow head-coverings for religious and medical reasons. We do, however, believe the application of this policy was not handled appropriately during the incident. Our community as well as X Lounge are taking steps to prevent its misuse in the future.”

Over at Waldo Jaquith’s cvillenews.com, the discussion got pretty heated under a post on the incident, with some folks calling for a boycott of the X Lounge, others saying they have a right to create any policy they want, that it was the fault of one dumb employee, and calling for less hysteria when talking about race. One person pointed out that Charlottesville City Schools have an even more restrictive dress code, but someone else made note of the fact that the X Lounge apology came after the ISA rallied folks at UVA, not when their president explained to the manager at the time that he was required to let the Sikh student inside.