Elon Musk's brand-new Tesla Diner might have opened to huge hype last week, but it hasn't taken long for customers to start calling out the food being served – and one dish in particular has sparked a full-blown online debate.
The Hollywood-based diner, which doubles as a Tesla Supercharging station, promised a retro-futuristic drive-in experience along Route 66, with a menu full of classic American favourites. Prices start at $7 for cinnamon rolls and stretch up to $15 for a plate of biscuits and gravy. But it's the $12 'Epic Bacon' that's grabbed headlines – and not necessarily for the right reasons.
According to Tesla's own promo shots, Epic Bacon is meant to be a generous cupful of thick-cut, maple-glazed rashers sprinkled with black pepper, served with a dipping sauce on the side. Sounds pretty decent, right? Well, the reality hasn't lived up to expectations for everyone.
When visiting to cover for Rolling Stone, journalist Miles Klee visited the diner and shared a thread containing a picture of what he was served on X (formerly Twitter), writing: "went today and here's how it actually looks." The image, which has been viewed over six and a half million times, shows just a single lonely rasher poking out the top of a cup that looked far from full.
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Further down the thread, Klee wrote: "I mean quality of the meat and cooking aside, if you want to serve bacon like fries you might at least get the right size container".
In the Rolling Stone write-up, he added: "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 will never be justifiable."
And the bacon wasn't the only problem. Klee claims his $13.50 Tesla Burger arrived missing half its bottom bun, while the patty itself was "fairly scorched throughout."
Social media users were quick to weigh in on the bacon saga, with one person in the aforementioned thread replying: "$3/bacon strip is wild."
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Another added: "$12 bacon??? sounds horribly over priced." A third joked: "Unless that bacon is dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt? I'm not paying $3 a slice. That's robbery."
Not everyone agreed, though. One diner replied to Klee’s post with their own photo of the Epic Bacon, showing a much more generous portion that actually resembled Tesla's advert: "Unfortunate, this is what mine looked like... i enjoyed it.”
They added a further reply, saying: “nice and crispy but not dry, i was a fan of the sweetness coming from the real maple syrup. it arrived only mildly warm though and they could probably do with a slightly thicker cut. overall i’d give it a light 8," they wrote.
With Tesla's first diner experience now under intense scrutiny, fans are left wondering whether this is just teething issues or if Musk's latest venture is already running on empty.