At the Tesla Diner, the Future Looks Mid

New York Times

2 days ago

When Elon Musk announced that he was building the Tesla Diner in 2018, it was sold as a wholesome, Americana-flavored vision of the future in Hollywood — electric cars charging around a communal big screen while drivers fueled up on reimagined fast food.
Since then, Mr. Musk, the world's richest man and Tesla's chief executive, acquired Twitter in a chaotic takeover, donated millions to President Trump's 2024 campaign, and as the former head of DOGE set out to slash agencies across the federal government.
By the time Tesla Diner opened in July, Tesla had reported declining revenue and the Los Angeles restaurant looked more like a distraction for a brand in crisis — a viral marketing exercise on a half-acre lot where you could pretend the Cybertruck wasn't a flop.
From the vantage point of a drone camera, two stories high, the Tesla Diner might still appear as a retro-futuristic spaceship gleaming on Santa Monica Boulevard, but from the point of view of a person, down here on the ground (hello!), it's something else.
On the weekends, you're just as likely to see protesters waving images portraying Mr. Musk as a Nazi, as to see fans livestreaming their shuffle through the line. Plenty of people never leave their cars, ordering food delivered to them by servers while they charge at one of 80 reserved spots.
As I waited to get in, a woman on a skateboard whooshed by shouting, 'Losers!' at the line while people carried out bags of Tesla merch — T-shirts, baseball caps, gummy candies and robot action figures. I saw several Cybertrucks parked below the big screens (which were, at that moment, playing an ad for Cybertrucks).
The food itself looked like merch, too: waffles embossed with the Tesla app's lightning-bolt icon and dusted with powdered sugar, like the Mickey waffles at Disney parks. Burgers and sandwiches packed in vented Cybertruck-shaped boxes, at least until the kitchen ran out of them.
For the culinary portion of the project, Tesla hired the restaurateur Bill Chait, known for République and Tartine, along with Eric Greenspan, the chef of the Foundry on Melrose who has lately been developing ghost-kitchen concepts, including MrBeast Burger. Mr. Greenspan also formulated a Kraft single dupe at his company New School American, and that thin, sticky rendition of American cheese, made from a base of aged Cheddar, shows up all over the Tesla menu.
In its first hectic days of business, most of the menu items advertised across platforms weren't available. When I went, there were no salads, no veggie patties, no club sandwiches, no avocado toasts, no beef tallow-fried hash browns, no biscuits, no pies, no cookies, no soft serve, no milkshakes, no 'epic bacon.'
But agreeable chicken tenders were sandwiched between tough waffles, slathered with a very sweet mayonnaise. And a generic beef chili was so finely ground under its puddle of cheese, the fact that it was Wagyu seemed irrelevant.
The hot dog — an all-beef Snap-o-Razzo — was withered by the time I made it to an empty chair in the full sun of the second-story balcony. (The shade sails had all been removed following an accident.)
Tesla engineers built a proprietary tool to flatten patties for the smash burgers with crisp browned edges, held together with caramelized onions and cheese, which seemed to be on most tables. It lent the dish a superficial whiff of innovation, but the burger didn't stand out in any meaningful way.
Tesla, which still promises a vision of the future to its devoted fans, fails to deliver on one that isn't bland and familiar. If you look past the design by Stantec, this is a high-volume restaurant with a menu of meat-focused fast food that diners order on touch screens, then pick up at the counter. It's an unremarkable model that chains rolled out years ago.
In marketing materials, and on its opening day, Tesla had teased a robot making popcorn on the second floor, but there were no robots in operation when I stopped in, other than the one I saw outside — a comedian dressed up as the Tesla Bot Optimus, smoking a cigarette, who said he planned to make funny videos until he 'got kicked out.'
I'd also read on Tesla's website that this was a 24-hour restaurant, but as a worker explained to me, it was 24 hours only for Tesla drivers who ordered on the app, from their cars. For everyone else, doors opened at 6 a.m. and closed at midnight. (Which might explain why some diners had reported waiting several hours to get inside — did no one tell them?)
Tesla Diner has been sold as a charging station, a drive-in and 'a classic American diner,' but by the time I left, I wondered if whoever wrote that copy had been to a diner. A diner is a kind of north star — its doors open, its menu constant.
For now, you never know how long it will take to get into the Tesla Diner or, when you do, what may or may not be available. Last week, after a post about the restaurant's 'epic bacon' went viral on X, disparaging the abyss between its artificially glossy image on the touch screen and its actual, grimmer presentation in real life, the bacon disappeared from the menu. What bacon? It was as if it never existed.
None of this seemed to deter the people in line. On my way out, I squeezed into an elevator with my colleagues, some international tourists and a few locals who'd eaten at Tesla Diner three times in one week and were already planning to come back. I couldn't make sense of it.
'We don't order anything except for the burgers now,' one of them told me. 'Everything else is just so bad.'
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