Have you ever really wanted a hamburger?

Tonight I went to J.G. Melon, a neighborhood pub with incredible burgers and an atmosphere that could best be described as the total opposite of hip. This is a place you enter and think, wow, I am the person in this room least likely to vote Republican. You would think this even if you always voted Republican, that wouldn't make the slightest difference.

The sea of men in pink collared shirts and women with pearls suggests that one has not have left the 1980s, maybe even 1950s. But the clientele, these are a lot of young people, in their 20s and 30s, though you wouldn't know it from their habits, which are as far from macrobiotic or multicultural as can be. The food--lotsa meat--and the people give no signs of being in 2004 in Manhattan. Connecticut, Nantucket, a country club, sure, but 3rd Avenue? It just doesn't make sense.

The Upper East Side may once have been Manhattan's last holdout, resisting all that is multicultural or macrobiotic, but those days are behind us, or so I thought until the smell of delicious burgers lured me into J.G. Melon and that strange world of blond-on-pastel.

Does it make me an idealist if I dream of a world in which New Yorkers of all races, creeds, and degrees of preppiness (and hipsterness) would voluntarily come together to eat burgers and drink beer in harmony? How about a pub filled with faux-hawks and headbands, with upturned collars and spiked bondage collars? Where are the carnivorous progressives? The vegan neocons? Why can't we all just get along?