Is It Okay to Like the Tesla Diner?

I drive a Tesla. I bought it in 2022, when I knew a bit about CEO Elon Musk’s questionable character, but could never have foreseen his reprehensible antics in the years following. I wish I could sell the car, but I’m underwater on my loan by some $10,000 since its resale value cratered. I won’t be buying another.

I’m not the only one who regrets their purchase in LA. As Musk aligned himself with Donald Trump, erratically laid off scores of government workers, and promoted an AI chatbot that has praised Adolf Hitler and fueled revenge porn, much of the city has turned against the notorious carmaker.

Nowhere is this clearer than the highly controversial Tesla Diner, which serves classic burgers, fries, and sandwiches to customers waiting for their Teslas to charge outside. The opening in mid-2025 was one of the most talked-about events in recent Los Angeles history. As protestors and Cybertruck diehards thronged to the diner seeking a cultural battleground, I was there covering the diner’s food from the beginning. My colleagues and I were initially fans of some dishes; less so of others.

Last month, as the Tesla Diner passed its first half-birthday, I revisited the restaurant to see how things were going. I regret to inform you that the food was — pretty dang good, maybe even better than when it opened.

I paid a Friday lunch visit with a restaurant publicist friend, Khuong Phan, who lives nearby. Phan (who does not represent Tesla Diner) passes by the diner often and says it’s usually mostly empty. The protests have faded away, as has the rabid Tesla fanbase. Tour buses occasionally drop off curious visitors in search of something to photograph. There was barely a wait for a charging spot or food. (When asked about the performance of the business, Tesla Diner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

I plugged in and ordered away on a screen. After about 20 minutes (a bit long for fast food), a server brought our order: Egg bites with kale and chopped mushrooms were nearly silken, and the fries were utterly crispy. The tuna melt was adequate, if uninteresting, but the well-toasted bread was light as air. The sloppy smash burger featured a profoundly beefy patty. The “epic” bacon was limp, though it was encrusted with an appealing blend of herbs and sugar. The cinnamon roll was a tad better than gas station-level, but the strawberry matcha shake, tinted with pandan syrup, was absolutely stellar.

When the diner first opened, seasoned LA restaurateur Bill Chait led operations while chef Eric Greenspan ran the kitchen. A few weeks later, I returned to find the sizable menu greatly diminished, reduced to a few savory and sweet items, which I tried and found worse than at opening. When I wrote about it, Greenspan and Chait weren’t too happy about the article and told me as much over text. Greenspan left the restaurant after four months, but Chait still seems to be in charge (though the restaurant didn’t respond to confirm that).

I didn’t have high expectations going into my meal this month, especially after reading a six-month retrospective in Autoblog. Other publications have picked up that story and piled on to the narrative of Tesla Diner’s “demise.”

The food, featuring sustainably sourced ingredients from nearby farms and ranches, would be celebrated in any other venue. But because this is Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner, every bit of food, served in absurd Cybertruck-shaped boxes, comes weighted down with cultural baggage. Sure, $98 (after tax and tip) was a lot of dough for our meal, but Phan and I ordered way more than necessary. An average meal might be $25-30, certainly not exorbitant for well-sourced fast food — and definitely less than a meal at Phil Rosenthal’s hyped-up LA diner Max & Helen’s.

I don’t really ever need to go back to the Tesla Diner. The food isn’t revelatory or exciting. Musk once planned for the restaurant to act as a model for diners and charging stations across the world, but I don’t see that happening. Tesla just lost its title as the top EV carmaker. If the comments on Instagram and TikTok are any evidence, the diner, which was intended as a halo product to boost the company’s image, can’t escape the pull of the cultural black hole created by its erratic billionaire CEO.

The restaurant has gone into a strange purgatory, becoming something that feels wrong to like. There was a world where the Tesla Diner could’ve been great. It’s making decent fast food, at attainable prices, with farm-fresh ingredients that chefs could appreciate. It operates next to more than 70 EV charging stations that are hugely needed if America wants to wean the auto industry off fossil fuels. But after millions of dollars in buildout and thousands of negative comments on social media posts, the Tesla Diner barely has any voltage left.