Elon Musk opened a restaurant in Hollywood. What could go wrong? I went to discover it | Los Angeles

It was just before lunch during her third day of operation, and the line outside the new Elon Musk diner diner in Hollywood has already extended to almost 100 people.

The restaurant was presented as a “retro-future” record where you can have a high-end hamburger and watch classic movies on giant screens, while loading your Tesla.

After months of accumulation and controversy, the dinner suddenly opened on Monday, at 4:20 p.m., the kind of joker Boy for which Musk is well known. Hundreds of fans have lined up to try hamburgers in cybertruck boxes, or take pictures of the Optimus robot serving popcorn on the roof terrace of the sparkling circular restaurant.

But it was for the big opening. Less than 48 hours later, when we visited for lunch, the Tesla Diner experience was less a futuristic fantasy than a case study on how to fail with impunity. Many parts of the experience were decomposed, the food was poor, but the fans were always laid out to buy MERCH.

The line to enter the restaurant on Wednesday morning was so long, an employee told us, partly because of technical problems. The application that allowed Tesla drivers to order from their cars, so the restaurant “prioritizes” the owners of Tesla who had to enter inside. This meant that the owners of non-TESLA in the meeting line might need to wait up to two to three hours before taking our food.

I expected that at least a few people immediately leave the walking line, but the only ones who did it were two families of Tesla owners who returned to the order of their cars. Even if the application did not work for them, they would always get their food faster. The hierarchy was clear: things were broken for everyone, but the owners of musk products had to suffer a little less.

The rest of us was waiting for the hot sun. “Retro-futurism”, in this case, seemed to signify a magnificent modern architecture, inspired by Tesla-Inred and the middle of the century, associated with waiting times that would close an ordinary McDonald’s. An episode of Star Trek was playing on giant cinema screens, but the best available entertainment was to watch the deceived cybertrucks arrive and leave. I counted at least six when I arrived, and more continued to appear: a neon orange cybertruck with plates in Texas, another floating on giant personalized rims. I did not spot a single anti-MUSC demonstrator, although publications on social networks publish events outside the restaurant later in the week.

‘It’s like that’

Musk’s special projects have often taken place with a degree of chaos. More recently, his attempt to dismantle the major parts of the United States government ended with him by competing in the president he had spent nearly $ 300 million to elect.

Serving high-end burgers for Tesla fans while they load their electric cars should be much easier than launching space rockets, developing brain implants or managing a social media platform that is not invaded by hate speech and harassment. And Musk’s Diner Operation Partners, the chief of Los Angeles, Eric Greenspan, who advised Mr. Beast Burger, and the restaurateur Bill Chait, from Republic and Tartine Bakery, have impressive references from the food industry.

But the billionaire CEO tends to make major promises and not to keep them completely. It seemed to be true even for a tiny hamburger.

You don’t have to own a Tesla to order a dinner meal, and its attraction has clearly reached far beyond Tesla drivers. On Wednesday, there were a lot of people in the meeting line with babies and grandchildren, some of whom were particularly delighted to visit the Tesla Diner after seeing videos on this subject. While we have all waited and expected, the employees of the brand T-shirts brought us glasses of water and paper menus.

Jake Hook, who runs a “dinner Theory” social media account focused on Los Angeles, described the Tesla Diner menu for me as “everywhere”, with a combination of “very fast” items, combined with sandwiches made with “bread from Tartine”, luxury California Bakery. The restaurant also offers a mixture of “Libs owners” and “We Are the Libs”: on the one hand, “Epic Bacon”, four bacon bands are served with sauces like alternative to meat with fries, and on the other, toast to lawyer and matcha lats. There was a cabbage salad served in a cardboard cybertruck: welcome in southern California.

“The guests are in a way the reflection of the community, and that does not really seem to be that,” said Hook on the phone. “It’s like a restaurant on the theme of dinner.”

An employee gave the Wednesday update on Wednesday update: he had no chicken, waffles or milkshakes, nor any of the “loaded sodas”, which came with cherries Boba and Maraschino and additional caffeine.

“It’s getting better and better,” sighed a man behind me.

Josh Bates and his son Phoenix were in town for the day of Orange, where they lived. “We are big musk fans,” he said.

Phoenix, 10, had been delighted to visit the restaurant. “I have never seen Elon Musk open a restaurant, so I just wanted to come here and see how food is,” he said.

But after riding for 20 minutes and not getting closer to the order, Bates decided that it was time to find elsewhere for lunch. “It’s the big opening – things happen,” said the father. “That’s what it is. They do their best. “

Bates was not the only fan of Musk to have this attitude. Ivan Daza, 36, who lived in Los Angeles, later told me that he had waited two hours the day before, to be informed around 6 or 7 p.m. that the Tesla restaurant was closed. He had brought his eight -year -old daughter the next day to try again. She had seen the Tesla diner on YouTube and was particularly excited to see the Optimus robot. But it turned out that Optimus was not in service.

Daza said he was surprised by the various problems that cooking seemed to have – he thought they would have a “plan B”. But it was happy that the restaurant offered an “experience”.

The prices, although expensive, were not that bad for Los Angeles. The hamburger was $ 13.50, without fries. Later, when Daza ate the meal that had taken him two days to get, he smiled: “Delicious”.

The interior design was certainly closer to Disneyland than in-n-out: all elegant and shiny chrome, chairs and futuristic white tables from the 1950s, and beautifully designed lighting. The curved staircase to the Skypad was decorated with robots in windows on the wall. Inside a curved chrome window was what looked like a nice restaurant with low ordinary technology.

I had waited online for an hour before I could place my order. When I finally arrived in the register, I asked an employee to remember what was really available in the menu. She said I had to check the screen in front of me – they had everything that was there. It turned out, contrary to what I was told that I could order chicken and waffles.

After the long wait outside, my food arrived in about 10 minutes – much less than the three -hour waiting I feared, but absurdly long for any fast restaurant. A waffle, marked with the Tesla flash, was cold. The fried chicken had a tasty coating but was also cold. The heap of kale and tomatoes was only partially dressed with a strange vinaigrette in the dill. The generic brand cola had a cheap taste and was served with an awakened bamboo straw. But the food came in elaborate cybertruck boxes – and they were, to be honest, delicious.

While residents seemed to forgive the problems of the new restaurant, some tourists were less impressed. Rick Yin, 32, who visited Los Angeles of China with his mother, stopped at the restaurant on the airport path to “take a quick lunch” which had proven not to be fast. Yin had also been delighted to see the Optimus robot in action, and hoped that the restaurant would be “more high technology”. What he had found was “an ordinary restaurant”.

“Everything is fine,” he said, while waiting for his food. After eating, he said he loved Cybertruck boxes: “It’s the only thing worth it.”

Musque’s “Retro-Futurism”

I took my meal upstairs, at Skypad, an outdoor balcony with a view of the load teslas. The Twilight area was now playing on two giant screens. I sat next to a regular range of people buying Tesla Diner Merch: a retro hooded sweatshirt at $ 95, $ 65 Tesla Salt and Pepper Shakers, a “Levitation Cybertruck” figurine of $ 175.

There was a large popcorn machine in front of me, which seemed to be the place where Optimus served snacks on the opening night. Musk had published on X earlier in the morning than “Optimus will bring food to your car next year” and suggest that the robot could be dressed in a “cute” retro keen.

In reality, Optimus was nowhere in sight. The robot was “released today,” said an employee later, as if the expensive price was a human celebrity with a busy schedule. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Is it possible to get popcorn whatever the robot?” asked for a woman.

“It’s probably an old popcorn,” said an employee with regret.

A different employee warned me that I could not go down the same staircase I had taken at the Skypad because he was too crowded and that “everyone is colliding with each other and the sets and the milkshakes”. I should go down in another way: a bland staircase without high technology decoration.

During a call for results from Tesla on Wednesday, when the company revealed a drop in income and profits, Musk highlighted its new Burger palace as a success: “The guests generally do not obtain the newspapers of the earth”, he boasted. He also called the restaurant “a brilliant hoope of hope in an differently dark urban landscape”. (It is located on Boulevard Santa Monica, in a neighborhood full of high -end art galleries.)

I had had a lot of time in the restaurant line to reflect on “retro-future” experiences, and the quality of a description that was not so much for this very ordinary restaurant, but for the right-wing political project that Musk had joined. We now move in the future that offered electric cars in the shape of a reservoir and deliveries of drone on demand, as well as a resurgence of the epidemics of measles and women dying of complications related to preventable pregnancy.

But continuing to operate in the United States at the moment needs to be very good in compartmentalization. I hid the Cybertruck cardboard cover to show my colleagues, thrown the Tesla waffles and continued my day. Nothing works properly here, but hey, it’s an experience.