Add the Tesla Diner to the List of Elon Musk Projects That Fail to Deliver on Promises

You are not going to believe this, because there is absolutely zero precedent for it happening; it appears Elon Musk has overpromised on something. It has only been two weeks since the Tesla Diner, a charging station and restaurant with a retro-futuristic aesthetic, and it is already significantly narrowing down its menu offerings, according to a report from Eater.

In classic diner fashion, the restaurant offered a robust menu when it first opened, but it is down to just five sandwiches, two sides, two types of pie, shakes, and drinks. Gone are the market salad, club sandwich, hash brown bites, biscuits and gravy, and chocolate chip cookies—along with the veggie patty option for burgers. Breakfast items have gone from being available all day long to only during the morning hours. Even the Shirley Temple and Creamsicle fountain drinks have been removed.

Perhaps most devastating to Musk is the removal of the “Epic Bacon,” a $12 side that offers four strips of maple-glazed bacon (that turned out to be significantly less epic in person). You can still get the regular kind, per Eater, but only as an add-on topping for sandwiches, not as a standalone side. Musk apparently insisted that every dish on the menu be “epic,” a meaningless benchmark that offers zero guidance. Based on the cutback, it seems like not many cleared the bar.

To be fair to the people who work at the diner, who are decidedly not Elon Musk and mostly just people trying to make a living and probably shouldn’t be subject to the schadenfreude, the situation probably sucks. The diner’s chef, Eric Greenspan, told Eater that the cutbacks were the result of “unprecedented demand” that required the menu to be scaled back. And there has been lots of attention on the place. 404 Media reported that the diner has been chaotic and subject to heavy traffic. A reporter from Autoweek said he had to wait in line for two hours to place an order. No one is having a good time except for Musk, who just gets to tweet about the thing without having to actually be involved in the hell that is running a restaurant.

The strangest part about how popular the place seemingly is, though, is the fact that no one really seems to enjoy the food, but continues to be drawn to the experience. Motortrend said, “the food is only okay.” The New York Times called it “mid.”

In perhaps the most damning indictment of the whole thing, InsideEVs wrote, “I’m not sure the quality of food even matters much” while arguing that the diner is something we “need.” That checks out with an anecdote from the Times, which quoted a patron who had already been three times as saying, “We don’t order anything except for the burgers now. Everything else is just so bad.” They also plan to come back again. I guess we’re all just moths to a deeply unimpressive flame.