Hollywood, California – When he announced in 2018 he would build Tesla Diner, the proposal was a healthy and American flavor vision of the future in Hollywood – electric cars carrying a large community screen while drivers fueled a reinvented fast food.
Since then, Musk, the richest man in the world and CEO, has acquired Twitter in a chaotic acquisition, donated millions to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2024 and, as a former chief of the government efficiency department, sought to cut agencies throughout the federal government.
When Tesla Diner was inaugurated in July, Tesla had already reported a drop in the recipe, and the Los Angeles restaurant looked more like a distraction to a brand in crisis – a viral marketing exercise on a 2,000 m² land where Cybertruck could be pretended to be not a failure.
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View of a two -story drone camera, Tesla Diner may still seem like a retrofuturistic spacecraft shining in Santa Monica Boulevard, but from the point of view of a person below (Hello!), It’s something else.
On weekends, it is so common to see protesters shaking images that portray Musk as a Nazi as they see fans broadcasting their ticket in line. Many people never get out of cars, asking for food delivered by waiters while carrying at one of the 80 points reserved.
While waiting to enter, a skateboard woman shouted “losers!” To the line, while people carried Tesla product bags – T -shirts, caps, gum candies and robot dolls. I saw several Cybertrucks parked below the large screens (which at that time displayed a Cybertrucks announcement).
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The food also looked like merchandising: waffles with the Tesla app ray icon in relief and sprinkled with icing sugar, such as Mickey’s Waffles in Disney parks. Hamburgers and sandwiches packed in Cybertruck -shaped ventilated boxes, at least until the kitchen is without them.
For the culinary part of the project, Tesla hired the restaurateur Bill Chait, known for République and Tartine, along with Eric Greenspan, Foundry chef in Melrose, who has developed Ghost Kitchen concepts, including Mrbeast Burger. Greenspan also created a similar version of the Kraft Single (a type of processed cheese sold in the US) in his company New School American, and this thin and sticky version of American cheese, made from aged Cheddar, appears throughout the Tesla menu.
In the first busy days of operation, most items announced on the platforms were not available. When I went, there were no salads, vegetarian hamburgers, club sandwiches, avocado toast, fried hash brown, chickens, pies, cookies, ice cream, milkshakes or the “epic bacon.”
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But the pleasant chicken thighs came between hard waffles, covered with a very sweet mayonnaise. And a generic meat chili was so thinly ground under a layer of cheese that it was Wagyu seemed irrelevant.
The hot dog-a snap-o-razzo totally beef-was withered when I got an empty place in the sun of the second floor of the porch. (The guard suns had been removed after an accident.)
Tesla engineers created a proprietary tool to flatten the Smash hamburgers with crispy and gold edges, kept together with caramelized onions and cheese, which seemed to be at most tables. This gave the plate a superficial air of innovation, but the hamburger did not stand out significantly.
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Tesla, who still promises a future vision to her dedicated fans, gives nothing but something boring and familiar. If you look beyond STTTAC’s design, this is a large -volume restaurant with a meat -based fast food -focused menu that customers ask for touch -sensitive screens and then remove at the counter. It is a common model that networks have adopted for years.
In marketing materials and on the day of the inauguration, Tesla had announced a robot popcorn on the second floor, but there were no robots in operation when I was there except one outside – a comedian dressed like Tesla Bot Optimus, smoking a cigarette, who said she planned to make funny videos until she was “expelled”.
I also read on the Tesla website that the restaurant operated 24 hours, but an employee explained to me that it was 24 hours only for Tesla drivers who asked for the app from inside the cars. For everyone else, the doors opened at 6am and closed at midnight. (What may explain why some customers reported waiting for hours to enter – nobody warned?)
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Tesla Diner was sold like a recharge station, a drive-in and “a classic American Diner”, but when I left, I wondered if the description wrote had already gone to a real diner. A Diner is a kind of guide star-its doors are always open, its menu is constant.
For now, you never know how long it will take to enter Tesla Diner or, when you enter, what will be available. Last week, after a viral post on platform X on the restaurant’s “epic bacon”, criticizing the distance between the artificially brilliant image on the touch screen and the darker performance, the bacon disappeared from the menu. What bacon? It was as if he had never existed.
None of this seemed to be discouraged people in line. When I left, I entered the elevator with colleagues, some international tourists and some places that had already gone to Tesla Diner three times in a week and planned to return. I couldn’t understand.
“Now we just ordered the hamburgers,” said one of them. “The rest is very bad.”
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