Call me crazy, but I have certain expectations of any establishment calling itself a “diner.” In general, I shouldn’t have to wait for a seat. The interior ambiance should be warm and welcoming, with comfortable booths — perhaps with their padding slightly worn from years of visits from loyal customers. I should be able to order off a laminated menu, from a waiter or waitress with an easy tableside manner. The food should not be overthought or trendy, just a spread of classic American fare, with a few specialties particular to the region. And I should leave with the sense that I have been well fed at a reasonable price.

The new Tesla Diner on the western edge of Hollywood, the long-delayed realization of a whim from CEO Elon Musk, does not meet these basic criteria. In some ways, of course, that can’t be helped: When I showed up at 1 p.m. on Thursday, the restaurant’s fourth day of supposedly 24/7 operation, there was line of families, tourists, and Tesla enthusiasts eager to check the place out wrapping all the way around the block. People circled the building recording videos with their phones mounted on selfie sticks. One fellow wore a Back to the Future shirt that featured a Cybertruck in place of the iconic DeLorean, and Musk as Marty McFly.

“Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA,” Musk tweeted in 2018, long before his transformation into a misinformation superspreader and Trump megadonor. Just ahead of the launch seven years later, the Tesla CEO declared the finished restaurant to be “one of the coolest spots in LA!” He also posted on X that Tesla aimed to open up other diners in “major cities around the world,” and that the company’s Optimus robots would be serving food to customers in their Teslas by next year — though he soon deleted that last and most dubious claim. Nonetheless, a grand opening demo of an Optimus serving popcorn led many to believe that the bots would have customer-facing jobs, despite engineers on site confirming that this one was remotely operated by a person, not moving independently. As usual, Musk’s hype had driven expectations to unreasonable highs.

Earlier in the week, I had seen a lone protester outside the diner with a sign that said “Workers Should Have the Power — Not the Billionaires.” On Thursday afternoon, there was no anti-oligarch activism afoot, only excitement and anticipation. A friend who, like me, grew up in the fine diner culture of New Jersey, joined me at the end of the queue, which lasted an hour and a half. Periodically, an employee came through and asked if anyone waiting was currently charging their Teslas in the parking lot; the few who were received complicated instructions on how to order from their cars, either for delivery to the vehicle or to pick up inside when the food was ready. I was supposed to have my own Tesla for this visit, but because Hertz does not feel bound to honor its rental reservations — that’s a review for another time — we were, like so many others, lowly walk-ins unable to accelerate service. In the meantime, we were advised that we could see the menu at TeslaDiner.com. The URL led to a blank webpage.

The two-story diner is clearly meant to give the impression of an alien spacecraft, though it’s an awfully generic one — not up to Disneyland standards, anyway. Outside, it’s flanked by a pair of four-story movie screens (unbelievably, one of them totally blocks the windows and balconies of a neighboring apartment building, where residents must be furious) that play space-themed Looney Tunes cartoons, old sci-fi movies, Cybertruck ads, SpaceX launches, and abstract laser patterns, usually at low resolution and with the wrong aspect ratio. Very few of the parking spaces face either screen, as they would in the traditional drive-in theater Musk had apparently envisioned. Noise concerns had been downplayed with promises that sound would beam directly into parked Tesla vehicles, but an episode of The Jetsons blared in the summer air as we turned the corner toward the diner entrance.

Once inside, you immediately place your order not with the cashiers at the registers but on one of the touchscreens right in front them. Much of the mixed seating (stools, booths, and outside tables upstairs) sat empty, presumably as the kitchen would’ve been unable to contend with a full house, which also explained the staggered entry. The space was loud and chaotic anyway, with much of the staff squeezed into a narrow aisle between the kitchen and the counter and having a difficult time moving past one another. We opted for some uncomfortable counter stools while we waited for our food so we could watch them scurry about as celebrity chef Eric Greenspan, who has competed on TV shows like Iron Chef and Guy’s Grocery Games and developed MrBeast Burger, stood at the kitchen window, shouting out items missing from orders. When not managing workflow problems, he was vexed by a quirk of the menu: People were ordering the “lettuce burger,” not realizing it came without a bun, then asking for a bun. Greenspan pulled over an employee who was evidently on site for tech troubleshooting and demanded that he edit the menu to say “no bun” to prevent any further confusion.

We had decided to sample the imaginatively named Tesla burgers, as well as fries (made in tallow, to conform with the recent right-wing craze) and sides of “Epic Bacon.” The food took about 20 minutes, and my companion initially received a burger heaped with chili and a fried egg instead of what she had ordered. Although we’d given our phone numbers and been informed that a text would alert us when our orders were ready, neither of us got one; instead, the staff was just calling out receipts. After fetching our meals, we sat back down to appraise them. My burger was missing half of its bottom bun, and the attempt to deliver the advertised “smashed, crunchy edges” had left the meat fairly scorched throughout. This and the fries were no competition for many fine alternatives around Los Angeles.

The bacon was a sadder affair, and I accidentally went viral on X by posting a picture comparing mine to the far more appetizing image on the menu. It was chewy, not crunchy — despite being partly charred — with a sickly-sweet maple glaze. A properly sized carton may help with presentation, but charging $12 for four slices of this stuff will never be justifiable. The condiments like “Electric Sauce” were the usual relabeled chipotle mayo and similar stuff. A “charged” lime rickey with “natural caffeine,” whether or not it gave me a noticeable buzz, tasted fine — I was puzzled, however, by a line on the ticket attached to my plain white cup that said “#tesla,” as if I might forget who sold me the soda. Any leftovers could be ferried home in a cardboard Cybertruck box, naturally.

All told, none of this was worth the time or the expense. The heavy cuisine left us both a little queasy, and I was mildly nauseated again the following day to learn that someone had snapped photos of boxes of frozen products and milk that were apparently sitting behind the restaurant in the July heat. If only there were a couple of helpful humanoid robots that could move them! Alas, despite Tesla’s misleading marketing, the only Optimus models we saw were behind glass, posed like museum exhibits.

The bots, which can be found on your way up to the second level, constitute almost the entirety of the restaurant’s decor. In the absence of better chow, you’d hope for at least an interesting setting, yet when you look around the ground floor, there isn’t much that catches the eye. The sleek walls offer only Tesla propaganda slogans such as “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” It was less like being in the future than in a drably minimalist McMansion. The “Skypad” rooftop is a bit nicer, and feels like it takes more inspiration from Googie architecture of the Space Age. Still, it seems to go underutilized while people congregate downstairs and would be far more suitable for a cocktail bar. Moving between the different parts of the property was awkward. An attendant stood at the top of the staircase, and for some unexplained reason stopped everyone who tried to walk back down the same way, saying they had to wait for the (hot, cramped) elevator. One wonders if this was as necessary as, say, maintaining the restrooms, one of which had a floor covered in piss and empty soap dispensers. Oh, and there were only three single-use bathrooms for an eatery that seats 250.

The Tesla Diner, like so many of Musk’s ideas for the company, is intended to make a statement. And, as always, that statement is no more nuanced or groundbreaking than: “Tesla is cool.” The problem is that this mission overrides every practical consideration — in this case, how a diner normally functions and what keeps one in business. In that sense, you can regard Musk’s silver eyesore on Santa Monica Boulevard as a culinary equivalent of the Cybertruck. Though a lovely staff did their best under tough conditions during the opening week, the design is ill-considered, the atmosphere is an afterthought, the system is disorganized, and the food is disappointing. True, while the Cybertruck has been widely mocked as a lemon and sold poorly, it has its ardent fans, and no doubt the Tesla Diner can count on the support of a similar customer base while continuing to draw crowds as a tourist trap, no matter the quality of the experience. But can it really hope to expand into a robust chain, as Musk has said it will?

It’s no more likely than Tesla suddenly selling off all its surplus Cybertrucks. Musk has a way of not delivering on his many confident predictions and promises. Once the novelty factor has worn off, there won’t be anything to entice the average Angeleno, living in a city of outrageously diverse cuisine and plenty of storied diners, to come back a second time, except maybe for the supercharger stations. (My friend joked that it could well be converted to a luxury cannabis store if it fails in the months to come.) Some diehard Tesla believers had complaints as well, griping about disorderly management and the diner shutting down at night, turning away guests who had been assured it was open around the clock. The unmindful construction planning, noise and light pollution, and Tesla traffic jams have meanwhile done nothing to endear the diner to those living nearby — the lifeblood of most successful restaurants — and anti-Musk demonstrators are organizing a series of protests at the location.

As the world’s richest man, Musk simply doesn’t have access to the realities of the service industry, or, for that matter, taking the family out to get burgers and milkshakes. When you leave this spot, you’ll have to ask yourself: When’s the last time this guy ate in an actual diner? As ever, his out-of-touch vision for what the 21st century can and should be is so hopelessly distant from human needs and habits that he has delivered a garish, soulless spectacle. One can scarcely imagine the amount of input he must have ignored from the industry veterans brought aboard for this project, indifferent to everything but his half-baked daydream of a Tesla charging lot where Tesla robots on roller skates bring you Tesla fast food while you watch towering footage of Teslas, a kind of living commercial for his trillion-dollar brand and pure antithesis of the humble neighborhood joint. The worst part is that he’s not even embarrassed.