Back And To The Future

Tom always said that our delicious and exceptional regional cuisine has made little room for ordinary food popular in places like Minnesota, what I think of as the diner headquarters. Maybe because I am spoiled as we all are in New Orleans that diners were always completely off my radar. And because of all these things, there are few diners in New Orleans, I have spent all of my life completely uninterested in diners.

And then the Jetsons arrived. 

Elon Musk has created The Tesla Diner in Hollywood, headquarters of imagination. It is imaginative indeed. There is a big screen for movies just like the drive-in theaters of yesteryear. It plays things like Star Trek and The Jetsons.

The place is a cross between diner food and L.A.club. The diner is round and entrance is granted by a man at the door who lets people in when he says so, usually after people have come out. 

Once inside, you place the order for food at the counter with people or monitors, and you can see inside a large window at the people preparing your food. 

The interiors are futuristic with colors of gray and white, and everything is sleek. 

A stairway leads upstairs to the terrace where tables with high tops and no chairs are available for stand-up eating.  There are circular booths with circular modular seating on each end of this space.

There were few people there when we went, especially because it had just opened. The robots to serve you your food are only there on weekends. This presents a conundrum. If entrance to the place is granted by a doorman who is watching numbers, it is better to go when we did, but we didn't see robots. This was very disappointing to a young German man who rode downstairs with us in the elevator. 

He had come mainly for the robots. He could only snap a picture of one in a wall.

But we had come for the food. The menu has been substantially reduced to accommodate the kitchen. They do breakfast, good hamburgers, and the saddest hot dog I have ever seen.

The burger was clearly cooked to order on a flat top grill, with crispy edges. It came  as we ordered it, with cheese, pickle and lettuce.

This burger was very tasty. The meat was good, with a nice grind, I would definitely get this again.

The hot dog looked like a Nuremberg sausage, It was very long and even skinnier, with a tight skin, and it was overdone even for me.

There was no relish for this, but I did get some spicy mayo. It didn't help.

We also got some fries, which were surprisingly decent. They were shoestring, crispy, and greaseless. 

There were shakes   and other items that we didn't try. These three things were $37.

Clearly these prices reflect the appeal of the Jetsons gimmick. And that is fine with me. Other than the Disney World of The Future, there is no other place to drop into the future like this, and conversely. slip back into the past with the era of drive-in movies. Fun.