Photographs by Yasara Gunawardena
The spiral staircase leading up to the roof-deck at Los Angeles’s Tesla Diner is beautiful, or at least it is expensive-looking. It has video screens overhead and glowy lights at the base of each step and its own special soundtrack, a down-tempo, bleepy-bloopy composition that whooshes in as a notable contrast to the main dining room’s dad rock. Glass display cases set into the walls hold human-size robots. Otherwise, every surface is covered in slick plastic, pure white. Like a lot of spaces these days, the staircase seems engineered to facilitate selfies.
When I visited one evening last month, an employee was stationed at the top of the stairs with a request: Those interested in returning to Earth should please take the elevator down. The staircase is too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic; people were bumping into one another. The beautiful staircase could do a lot, but it could not, as it turned out, perform its basic intended function, which is to give people a safe and simple way to move between floors using their feet.
I went to the Tesla Diner because I needed to see it for myself. The restaurant has been in the works since 2018, when Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced his intention to put an “old-school drive-in” at one of the electric-car company’s existing supercharging stations in Los Angeles. The waitstaff would wear roller skates, and you could get food delivered to your car. It would be a rest stop for the electric-vehicle era, and more directly, a solution to the problem of EVs taking significantly longer to charge than a gas car takes to fill up, leaving their owners with odd chunks of time. Tesla has already placed its superchargers near restaurants, and unaffiliated charging companies have recently begun to add amenities to their stations. The diner is an opportunity for the company to exert control and extract profit from all aspects of the charging process. On paper, it makes perfect sense.
Musk has said that if the response was positive, he would expand worldwide, ostensibly remaking restaurants in the way he has remade so much else. This didn’t, and still doesn’t, seem all that implausible to me. Musk has a demonstrated history of making real objects in the real world, even if they tend to come late and not work very well. People buy what he sells. He is, for better or for worse, his generation’s loudest spokesperson for the future, and for seven years, he has been promising the future of diners.
Now the future is here, a hulking mass on an unlovely corner at the border of Hollywood and West Hollywood, surrounded by luxury apartments and empty lots. The restaurant is run day to day by Eric Greenspan, the chef most recently behind a chain of ghost kitchens founded by the YouTuber MrBeast, and Bill Chait, a restaurateur most famously involved with the beloved California bakery chain Tartine. It is about half drive-in, half quick-service restaurant. Tesla drivers can order from, and get food delivered to, their charging cars 24 hours a day, but anyone can walk in during standard business hours.
When I did, late on a Friday afternoon, a man in black was sitting at an outdoor table, considering a piece of paper titled, in heavy capital letters, “EMPLOYEE EXIT INTERVIEW.” The 80-spot parking lot was about two-thirds full, mostly with Teslas. Looming above, on the walls of neighboring buildings, titanic screens played an episode of the 1960s sci-fi TV series The Outer Limits; later, they switched to a Spider-Man cartoon aimed at the preschool demographic. Clusters of people walked up to what sure looked like an entrance, on Santa Monica Boulevard, and were directed by an employee to a different door, a few paces away. That first door, apparently, is the exit. Yes, it’s a little confusing.
Inside, everything looks like the staircase: smooth and clean, chrome and plastic, blasted white and laptop-light blue, retro-futuristic references and curvilinear shapes—imagine the Jetsons running a vape shop. Walk-in customers order on a touch screen, get a number, find a seat themselves among circular tables with padded seats, and pick up their order at a counter when it’s ready. On the roof-deck—which there is called a “skypad”—they’ll find more seating and, beyond the parking lot, a nice view of the Hollywood Hills, though in late August the space was punishingly hot. There had, at one point, been shade screens, but one had reportedly fallen down and hit someone.
Adjusted expectations seem to be the way of the place. Early visitors to the diner were greeted by robots, but on the day I came, none was to be found, disappointing the many, many people I heard ask about them. No roller skates, either. And although it is ostensibly a diner, it has no table service; this is more like a fast-food joint with higher prices and extra seating. The menu has also shrunk considerably since opening day: When I visited, the only options were a burger, a grilled-cheese sandwich, a tuna melt, a fried-chicken sandwich, a hot dog, chili, fries, and apple pie. Most of these dishes were served in a cute cardboard container made to look like a Cybertruck, and had been made fancier in ways nobody asked for. The chili is made of Wagyu beef. The house cheese—available on 60 percent of the entrees and 100 percent of the sides—is not regular American but instead a premium substitute created by Greenspan after five years of research and development. The burger sauce is “electric” (tasted like mustard).
The chili was oversalted and oddly smooth, with a slab of nonmelting cheese sitting on top of it like a pillbox hat. (It did not come with a spoon, and when I asked for one, I was given a piece of wood, basically flat but for the faintest pucker of what may have been a Cybertruck silhouette.) The french fries had a disconcerting astringency, like they’d been dusted in the same stuff that’s put on Hint of Lime Tostitos. All together, the food, like its surroundings, is simultaneously over- and underconsidered, high form and low function. It isn’t bad so much as odd.
But really, no one is at the Tesla Diner on a Friday night for the food. When I asked around, the most commonly cited reason for visiting was to charge one’s car. The second was TikTok. In the elevator, a family on vacation from Taipei told me that they were there because they’d heard about the restaurant online. A man eating a hamburger alone underneath a wall declaring Tesla’s mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy” shrugged and told me that he’d come because it was “something new.” An older woman in a Four Seasons–branded zip-up had driven from Orange County to charge her car and see what the fuss was about. Everywhere, people took photos.
Less than two months old, the Tesla Diner is already a self-referentialist hall of mirrors, right down to the artifacts on the walls and the merchandise for sale everywhere you look. On offer: hats, T-shirts, salt and pepper shakers, a wind-up Cybertruck, a Tesla robot action figure, a pack of “supercharged” gummies—alas, not supercharged with anything fun. (According to an employee, the action figure is the best seller.) This is a diner where no one seems particularly interested in dining, a restaurant whose most important feature is actually the parking lot. Los Angeles contains hundreds of mediocre burger joints and hundreds of electric-vehicle charging stations; the appeal of this one is that it is also basically an Instagram museum, one where the theme is “Tesla Diner.”
So much design, so much technology, so much effort, so much money, all in the service of making something that is fundamentally the same as what we already have, just weirder and worse: Mostly, the Tesla Diner is a failure of imagination. As such, it’s consonant with the political project and campaign slogan put forth by Musk’s frenemy Donald Trump. Both men seem less interested in earnestly trying to imagine a new world than they do in sloppily re-creating an old one. They tend to do this by focusing on the superficial, dispensing with historical fact when inconvenient, and relying on nostalgia to a borderline anti-intellectual degree.
The nation’s best-known futurist had a chance to reinvent American dining, and what he came up with was hamburgers and pie and white-plastic furniture, with classic rock on the stereo and 60-year-old television on the drive-in screen. Musk became powerful and rich by selling something adjacent to environmentalism, but his restaurant does not, for example, do anything at all to reimagine beef, the production of which is significantly responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions. Rather, the most it has done for food innovation is remake American cheese into a higher-tech version that melts goofy and tastes like nothing new. If this is a vision of what’s next for dining, it’s a remarkably conservative one, rendered in the most backward-looking way possible. It’s not the future; it’s the past’s idea of the future. It’s not tomorrow; it’s Tomorrowland.
People love to romanticize the diner, but the truth is, it was never exactly the thing anyone acts like it is. In the ’40s and ’50s, it was just a smart business opportunity—easy to construct, simple to run, and eminently legible to would-be eaters, especially those who had recently come out of World War II with more kids and more discretionary income than before. Then, as those kids grew up and, inevitably, got sentimental about their childhood, the diner adopted a standard set of surface-level signifiers and effectively turned itself into a nostalgia factory. Now it’s a symbol. It’s not inherently special by virtue of being old or familiar. A lot of diners are really quite bad. But when they are great, it’s because people have taken care to make them great—to make sure they feel lived-in and sincere, to make sure the fries are seasoned just right.
I left the Tesla Diner feeling overstimulated, sunburned, and lightly queasy (not a metaphor—I ate a lot of cheese). A few days later, I watched the Outer Limits episode that had been showing when I arrived. In it, a man wakes up with no memory, his hand replaced by a computer. He soon learns that he’s a savior of sorts: the last surviving member of the human race, sent from a thousand years in the future to fight aliens and rescue his species from extinction. The final twist is that he’s not a man at all, just a robot very carefully designed to look like one—bloodless and brainless, stuck alone in a past he thought was the future.
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