The number of people eventually invited via Facebook was around 200, and estimates have about 150 people actually showing up for the party. Hudson's capacity is about 400, and Butler says that according to several of his and Odom's friends who were there, about that many showed up to a party thrown by Modern Luxury Houston a few days before the Hydeout.
But since Hudson was also open to the public December 28, the pair believes the trouble may have started when a regular came in, did not like what they saw, and decided to tell owner Adam Kliebert.
Marco Torres
Many people think Washington Avenue sports bar Sawyer Park uses its strict dress code as a thinly veiled cover to exclude racial minorities.
Marco Torres
Vintage Lounge owner Amir Ansari thinks Hudson Lounge's management bungled the way it handled the Hydeout at Hudson party: "You can't just turn the lights off and close if you get busy."
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"I sat there at the door and saw some of his regulars come in, see black people, and turn around and leave," says Butler. "But then some regulars came in and had a drink with no problem."
In the aftermath of the incident, Hudson did not help its rapidly plummeting reputation by changing its reason for ejecting Butler, Odom and their guests several times. "If you look at how the story evolved, first it was that they were not staffed, then it went into a dress-code issue," Butler says. "Then when the pictures of the party came out and that obviously wasn't an issue, it became that we were being rowdy."
Amir Ansari, who has had to deal with his own allegations of racial profiling and discrimination as owner of Vintage Lounge and Antique Bar (formerly the Gallant Knight), agrees that Hudson more or less made all the wrong moves in trying to manage its public-relations disaster.
"I think the ownership handled it all wrong," Ansari says. "New bar owners have all these fears. You can't just turn the lights off and close if you get busy or have a pop. To make things right, they could have reached out and hosted a few charity functions, maybe even started a college fund supporting African Americans."
Hudson has also come under fire recently for unrelated reasons, mostly parking issues with its Upper Kirby/Rice Village neighbors, including longtime Houston blues club The Big Easy. The Houston Press spoke with Adam Kliebert by phone in late January. He was cordial, but resigned to the fact that the damage had been done and that the best thing would be to move on from the Hydeout incident.
Kliebert would not go on the record, but did send the following statement via Hudson's PR representatives at Studio Communications:
"Thanks for your interest in furthering the discussion regarding the incident that took place. At this time, we are focused on moving forward with building our business, and do not think revisiting last month's events will be productive. Again, we lament the misunderstanding between the parties involved, and reiterate that Hudson Lounge is open for business to all."
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Just like grocery stores, car dealerships and banks, bars and nightclubs have a form of discrimination built into their fundamental business plans. It's called a dress code.
Dress codes are partially rooted in safety — mostly the part about shoes being mandatory; some honky-tonks in the area have banned sandals to help avoid crushed toes during two-stepping — and partially in the reality that a lot of people don't want to hang out and spend their money anywhere a lot of other people are dressed like slobs. It's bad for business.
Amir Ansari has a rather unorthodox, yet oddly precise, method of handling the crowds jockeying to get into his bars. It's his own brand of social engineering, as it were.
"A bar is like a prison, and we have to keep our population in check," he says. "We are outnumbered 100 to one — we have to prescreen. I'm not letting eight random guys come in in a group. They will usually start fights or bother the girls, which makes matters even worse.
"I want my customers, my regulars, to feel comfortable."
Ansari has structured the dress code at Vintage to encourage long-term business, or so he hopes. Patrons sporting designer labels such as Dolce & Gabbana or Armani will move on to the next trendy bar soon enough, while more casually clad customers in button-up shirts and khakis are more loyal, he says.
Beyond that, "We don't allow graphic printed shirts. No Affliction stuff — nothing you would see on Jersey Shore," Ansari adds. "No baggy hip-hop stuff, but even that style is dying off."
Most, but not all, of Houston's upscale bars have a dress code a bouncer enforces at the door. (Anvil on Westheimer, for example, does not have a perceptible dress code beyond the basic requirement that customers actually be wearing clothes.) Of the ones that do, it's more or less the same: Collared shirts, long pants and dress shoes or boots are mandatory, while sneakers, baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts are forbidden across the board.
Many people think that dress codes serve a more sinister purpose, that they are tailored to exclude minorities and "roughneck" types. To them, dress codes are a thinly veiled form of racism, and with examples such as Andrew Dewalt and the Indian-American DJ, it's not hard to see why. Comments like Ansari's about "hip-hop stuff" add even more racial overtones to the debate, although considering that hip-hop fashion has been embraced by as many races and cultures as rap music itself, that phrase is less racially loaded than it would have been 15 or 20 years ago.
