The Tesla Diner’s Menu Is As Overpriced, Under-Thought, And Full Of Dated Memes As The Cars

Tesla opened a diner in Los Angeles this week as a sort of retro-futuristic eatery in the vein of Dexter Jettster’s Coruscant restaurant, and its menu is full of exactly the sort of faux-elevated real-overpriced dishes you’d likely expect from such an establishment. So let’s take a look through the menu and see what we’re working with. 

The diner, which promises to also be both drive-in (with chargers and movie screens) and dive (thanks to a general lack of quality), has already had some menu shifts in the less than 24 hours it’s been open. Milkshakes and ice cream have been dropped, suggesting some McDonalds-esque problem behind the counter, though pies are still served a la mode — unclear how that works. What is clear, though, is that early reviews are mixed at very, very best. Many of the five-star reviews on Google Maps come from Tesla fans who wrote their thoughts before the establishment opened, while reviews based on experience complain about foods that are alternately dry or soggy, slow service, and generally comparing it to bargain-bin fast food offerings.

The “Tesla Burger,” known to the menu website’s backend as ASSET_ID_LACY_JUICY, is a smash burger with pickles, lettuce, onion, cheese, and sauce on a Martin’s potato roll. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the default burger of Shake Shack and also pretty much every other restaurant that makes a burger. Smashing the burger flat on the griddle gives you those crispy bits around the edges — the LACY from the asset name — and Tesla’s chefs do get points for putting the lettuce beneath the patty, where it belongs. 

The core issue with this burger isn’t the burger itself, but the fact that it costs $13.50 for what is essentially an eight-buck burger from Shake Shack. Sure, the Tesla diner claims to use marginally more beef than a single Shake Shack patty, but even a double from the latter — which comes out to more beef — costs less than the former. Are caramelized onions worth five bucks? Are they really? When In-n-Out is right there, with a double-double animal style plus fries and a drink for less?

The photo here looks appetizing enough, it’s pretty hard to make a smash burger look bad, but the real-life version manages. Truly just some unruly overcooked beef haphazardly slapped onto a too-small bun with no regard for anyone’s ability to hold it. The cheese also looks greasy as all hell. 

First meal at the new Tesla Diner! Solid cheeseburger and great beef tallow fries pic.twitter.com/QmnIjG9Yug

— Zack (@BLKMDL3) July 22, 2025

This is a $13 hot dog. It has mustard and onion-pickle relish and it costs 13 United States dollars. Yes, the off-brown chips are included, but come on. These all-beef franks come from Snap-O-Razzo, and appear to be the company’s Natural Cased Beefy Butcher Dogs — admittedly expensive to the consumer at three bucks a pop, but no restaurant worth its salt should be paying retail prices for meat. 

The choice to use an all-beef dog here is an interesting one, particularly when you look through some of the other food options. The breakfast tacos and gravy use an all-beef Mexican-style chorizo rather than a pork-based Spanish style sausage, and the chili (which will gets its own slide of ire later) is similarly beef. It seems the only meat options here are beef, breaded chicken breast, and the clearly Musk-named “Epic Bacon.” None of these items are bad on their own, but it’s nice to have a little bit of variety once in a while. Especially when we get to the fry oil later on.

Also, those Martin’s potato rolls aren’t even toasted. You’re already working with a rough bread-to-meat ratio here, and leaving the roll untouched is a surefire way to just make every bite taste like potato. Potato and onion, judging by the ratios here. At least, by serving only four potato chips on the side, they aren’t overdoing it on that flavor. 

This 🌭 is XL @Tesla Diner 😎 pic.twitter.com/F3G6KZkGlT

— JeebsTX 🇺🇸 (@JeebsTX) July 22, 2025

Jesus Christ. I know Elon is big on internet memes circa 2010, but these are things no one has cared about since 2010. They’re not just no longer in vogue, they’re actively cringe. Is the diner going to start serving Bawls too? Will there be a ThinkGeek pop-up on the roof? Bacon was big when Musk was 39 years old, and now at 54 it seems like he’s trying to recapture that online splendor of his slightly younger middle age — a period where he wore his hair long and his leather coats longer, in an aesthetic that can only be called “incel couture.” 

This is the first item here where the truly outrageous price tag — $12 for four strips of bacon — isn’t even the worst part. This probably doesn’t taste bad if you’re into bacon, with maple and black pepper being classic flavor combos for this particular cut of pork, but it’s just so played out at this point.

Noted roadkill connoisseur Robert F Kennedy Junior runs American health now, for some reason, and he’s seemingly fallen down the TikTok rabbit hole of declaring seed oils evil. His “Make America Healthy Again” agenda includes frying everything possible in beef tallow, a known source of heart disease-inducing saturated fats, rather than objectively healthier oils like canola or rapeseed. The Tesla diner’s fries are, of course, fried in beef tallow in accordance with the agenda. 

Do fries made with beef tallow taste better? Maybe, since tallow is just beef fat and fat is flavor, but try winning over anyone who’s a fan of Five Guys’ peanut oil-fried potatoes. But is it really worth all the health risks just to have a side dish that tastes more like half the main dishes at the Tesla Diner? Why can’t a side bring its own flavor, and not skyrocket your cholesterol in the process? 

I want a cinnamon roll so bad now. A good one, though, not whatever cold-looking stiff-dough trash Tesla is putting out. You just know that roll was cut out of a pan, rather than pulled. Don’t cut your cinnamon rolls! It makes them tougher!

Food at Tesla diner. Cinnamon roll looks yummy 😋 pic.twitter.com/AEyX6yD5Ag

— LilHumansBigImpact (@BigImpactHumans) July 22, 2025

But now I’m just thinking about other, better cinnamon rolls and salivating at the thought like a hot transsexual Homer Simpson. I wonder if the local Cinnabon will be open after work.

You know it’s going to be rough when the promotional picture makes you sad. These are, as is sort of a trend with pricing here, an $11 set of breakfast tacos. In Los Angeles, a city I’d call the absolute greatest in the U.S. for street tacos (fight me, Austin), you get two tacos with beef chorizo, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes (seemingly in two sadness-colored big hash browns rather than a home fry or even a tater tot situation), avocado, and a sauce made with American cheese. First, you may have noticed the absurd omission of any kind of salsa on these tacos. Second, who the hell uses American cheese on a taco?

This sauce appears to be made with your standard yellow American cheese, rather than anything more reasonable. No queso Oaxaca, no cotija, not even cheddar — American. I initially chalked this up to either some culture war crap, but it turns out there’s an even dumber reason: The diner’s chef, Eric Greenspan, owns the company that makes all this American cheese. Greenspan’s New School cheese company doesn’t make Oaxaca or cotija, so the Tesla diner doesn’t use objectively better choices. Greenspan just did a podcast with Barstool, by the way, in case you felt bad about me ragging on him. 

This is the real pièce de résistance, the dish that inspired me to write this whole blog in the first place: Wagyu chili. As a former Rochester resident with a love of garbage plates, I’m not against the chopped onions as a topping here, but I cannot abide a cheese sauce over chili outside of a chili cheese dog situation. Worse, though, is the use of wagyu. 

If you’re not familiar, wagyu cows are Japanese breeds that spend their life absolutely pampered (it’s unlikely Tesla is using actual Japanese wagyu, but there are American farmers that produce genuine wagyu). Wagyu cows live better lives than any of us, and their meat is prized for its marbling — the way little bits of fat run through the meat, making for incredibly tasty and juicy dishes. Of course, that only works if you’re preparing a wagyu steak. If you’re grinding the meat for chili, then the fat content makes no goddamn difference because you control that anyway. 

You can’t have ground beef with marbling! You can add as much fat content as you want to a meat grinder! Why the hell are you grinding wagyu, other than to justify your tiny $8 bowl of chili to people who recognize the word but don’t really know why it’s so desirable? Sure, some amount of wagyu beef will always end up in off-cuts bound for the grinder, but using the name implies a level of desirability and quality that ground beef can never live up to. It’s the dumbest part of this entire menu, and yet it’s emblematic of the whole thing — high-quality ingredients prepared in dumb ways, for too much money, all drenched in nuclear-yellow American cheese.