critic’s
notebook
At the
Tesla Diner, the Future Looks Mid
The new
Los Angeles restaurant from the electric car giant is a smash burger and
content machine, drawing Elon Musk’s fans and protesters.
Tejal Rao
By Tejal
Rao
Reporting
from Los Angeles, Tejal Rao is a chief restaurant critic of The New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/dining/tesla-diner-elon-musk.html
Aug. 5,
2025
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.
A woman
in a black t-shirt with a "Diner" logo hands a paper bag to a man
seated in the driver's seat of a black Tesla car, with two Tesla charging
stations in the background.
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.”
Read by
Tejal Rao
Audio
produced by Patricia Sulbarán
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