After opening the Tesla Diner in West Hollywood on July 21, chef Eric Greenspan spent numerous days essentially living at the restaurant.
“I was working 20 hours a day for the first two weeks,” Greenspan tells Observer during his first interview about the most buzzed-about restaurant in Los Angeles.
There was a lot of chaos and unpredictability, of course, including 2,000-plus-cover days, long wait times and anti-Elon Musk protesters with bullhorns. So Greenspan did what veteran chefs do: He focused on what he could control.
That’s how he found himself in the kitchen developing new dishes at 2 a.m. after his dining room was closed, but while his team was still fulfilling orders for Brandt Beef burgers and Frecker Farms strawberry milkshakes that were placed by visitors inside Teslas parked at the diner’s supercharger lot.
“While I was corralling the beast, I had to go to R&D mode, which was a little crazy,” Greenspan says.
Things have since stabilized at the diner. It’s still extremely busy on weekends, but the hype has died down a bit, and Greenspan estimates that guest counts are down 15 to 20 percent from the peak. Plus, Greenspan has improved ticket times by honing in on his most popular dishes, cutting items that were slowing down the kitchen and not serving his breakfast menu all day.
Come for breakfast or lunch on a weekday, and you likely won’t be part of a frenzy. On a lunch visit last week, I was able to place a touchscreen order immediately and got the hot dog, chili, tuna melt, matcha latte and chocolate shake within 10 minutes of walking inside. On a breakfast run, getting chicken and waffles with add-ons of cheese sauce and bacon also took less than 10 minutes. This is especially impressive when you realize Greenspan runs a scratch kitchen that’s cooking everything to order.
Today, the Tesla Diner is unveiling a new menu that grew out of Greenspan’s after-hours R&D sessions.
“Thematically, we want to be an ode to the roadside diner in a new modern way,” says Greenspan, who is operating the Tesla Diner alongside restaurateur Bill Chait. “But Tesla is a brand about sustainable abundance, and we definitely have a mandate in many ways to have plant-based options.”
The 50-year-old Greenspan, whose storied career includes being executive chef at the now-closed fine-dining stunner Patina when he was just 27, opening the critically acclaimed Foundry on Melrose, becoming a ghost-kitchen pioneer, launching MrBeast Burger and creating the New School cheese brand, wants the Tesla Diner’s plant-based dishes to offer the indulgence, nostalgia and comfort of classic diner food.
So he came up with a country-fried portobello mushroom, which is glazed in tamari for extra umami and roasted in an oven before it’s dredged and fried. It’s topped with a plant-based gravy.
“It eats like white gravy,” Greenspan says. “It’s got the nutmeg. It’s got the black pepper. It’s got a bunch of caramelized onions that we puréed smooth. We finish it with a little bit of oat milk.”
The mushroom is served with arugula and pickles on a plant-based brioche bun. The $13 sandwich is “an ode to chicken-fried steak,” per Greenspan.
Another new dish is a revision of a salad that Greenspan is now serving with a vegan green goddess dressing instead of the previous dill ranch. Greenspan is getting farmers market greens for the $9 kale-and-arugula salad, which also features cherry tomatoes, red onions that are pickled in-house and gluten-free breadcrumbs. Guests have the option of adding tuna, fried chicken or a burger patty to the salad.
Greenspan is also planning to roll out an extensive shake program next week.
“We believe we serve the greatest milkshakes in America,” he says.
He’s working on new options like a ceremonial matcha shake with pandan. Guests will also be able to get an all-day pick-me-up in the form of a mocha milkshake or an espresso milkshake. What Greenspan is calling the “ludicrous” shake ($13) will be half matcha and half strawberry with a whipped coconut topping. There will also be pie shakes, starting with a vanilla-based one with chunks of apple pie from Los Angeles bakery Winston’s Pies.
Greenspan is running a high-volume diner, but he’s still thinking like a fine-dining chef who’s obsessed with local ingredients.
“We purposely set up a fairly fragile supply chain,” Greenspan says. “It wasn’t a mandate from Tesla. It was a mandate from me. I looked at the ethos of the brand. I came up with the idea that the overwhelming majority of products that we serve here are sourced within one Tesla charge of the diner. So we’re at about 300, 350 miles.”
For his burgers, he’s getting a proprietary prime blend from Brandt Beef, which has a family-owned Southern California ranch. He’s serving Palisades Ranch and Mary’s Chicken. For his strawberry milkshake, he chops up Frecker Farms strawberries, roasts them in the oven and makes a chunky compote that he mixes with soft-serve from Valley Ford Cheese and Creamery. He adds Straus Family Creamery milk to his chocolate and vanilla milkshakes.
For breakfast tacos, Greenspan is putting Chino Valley Ranchers eggs and Baker’s bacon on Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project tortillas. (In the aftermath of this year’s devastating Los Angeles fires, Greenspan and Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project’s Sherry Mandell spearheaded 30,000 relief meals.)
Greenspan went to Burbank’s RC Provisions and asked for an ode to the chili served at L.A.’s Original Tommy’s burger joints. But he wanted it with wagyu. RC Provisions, which actually makes the chili for Tommy’s and the equally iconic pastrami for Langer’s, satisfied Greenspan’s appetite for indulgence, nostalgia and comfort.
“Look, it’s hard to believe, but when I was in high school, I had a little bit of a weight problem,” the heavyset Greenspan says with a smile. “And I lost 50 pounds my junior year in high school. The carrot I would dangle in front of me was my cheat meal every Friday, which was to go to Tommy’s and eat chili cheese fries.”
So you can, of course, order chili cheese fries at the Tesla Diner, which also offers cups of chili and chili-topped Snap-O-Razzo hot dogs. Like so much of his food, the chili is a story about Greenspan’s past, present and future. He is excited to share many more stories soon, but he’s a little busy in the meantime.
What he wants me to know now is that it wasn’t his time at Patina that prepared him for this opening. It was cooking for the masses at Coachella, where he is a fixture in the culinary lineup. It was opening MrBeast Burger and serving 6,600 double smash burgers in a single day.
Jeremy Brumley, a close friend of Greenspan’s who was previously the chief operating officer of MrBeast Burger, raised his hand to help with the Tesla Diner opening. Greenspan laughs as he thinks about the previous chaos he and Brumley experienced together.
“Why the fuck am I doing double burgers?” he says, recalling his MrBeast experience. “This could be half as easy if I did single burgers.”
So for the Tesla Diner, Greenspan figured out how to make one-patty burgers in a new way.
“I worked with Tesla engineers to design a smasher to take a third of a pound of beef and smash it in such a way that I got an inch disc of the smash, which is, in my opinion, the best part,” he says. “There’s that first bite and the last bite of the crunch. And in the middle is like a quarter pound of juicy, not smashed, not overcooked burger. I had the opportunity to do something unique because I had access to Tesla engineers.”
He’s had some discussions with Tesla about whether he should train a robot to make burgers. So far, he’s declined.
Nothing about this restaurant opening has been normal, but Greenspan says the challenge of “running into the fire” is exactly why he and Chait signed up for the Tesla Diner.
“What makes Bill and I great partners is that both of us are the Kool-Aid Man,” Greenspan says. “We’ll both run through a brick wall to get shit done.”
On July 23, two days after the Tesla Diner debuted, Greenspan sent me a text: “It’s been exactly what I thought it would be. Wild, crazy and unprecedented.”
I got another text from him on July 28: “I’ve never experienced anything remotely close to this madness.”
He hasn’t had the time or brain space to properly process the madness. But again, the important thing right now is zeroing in on what he can control.
“At some point, I look forward to sharing the details of what I think has been the craziest Los Angeles restaurant opening in history,” he says. “But right now, I’m focused on making sure that we continue the progress that we’ve made to serve an exemplary product and to create a great experience. We’ll tell stories in the future.”