In happier days, fast-food used to come with fries. Now, it just comes with politics, no substitutions. Happy Meal toys conspire to turn your children transgender, Chick-fil-A waffle fries signal your allegiance to the Christonationalist movement, and the jury remains out on Taco Bell until we figure out what species comprises the chalupa. So, the recently opened Tesla Diner was always going to court controversy. But its location in West Hollywood makes it something of a colonial fort, like a Waffle House in Park Slope, New York. Locals have treated it as such, with protests following the opening and reviews railing as much against Elon Musk as the food and decor.

A retrofuturism diner with memeable menu items like “Epic Bacon” seems made in Musk’s image, so I can’t blame people for conflating the two. Yet it would be wrong to hold the child accountable for the sins of the father. I visited the diner on a Friday afternoon with two curious friends, chauffeured by one in their fiancé’s mother’s Tesla. The Los Angeles experience consists mostly of such tangential connections and brief grazes of luxury. To my disappointment, there were no protests, which I hoped would be the meat of my review. I cannot say I’m surprised by this; I find that LA weather often spurs emotions but does not sustain them.

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If you’re sitting at the charging station, you can order from the car and skip the line entirely. From the car, we saw the peasants sweltering under complimentary white umbrellas like something out of Conclave. We scrolled the menu on the touchscreen, the options apparently vastly scaled back from a more optimistic debut. Once again, my reportorial plans were thwarted, as I intended to complain mightily about four strips of bacon for $13, but the “Epic Bacon” is only available during breakfast hours.

We ended up ordering two cheeseburgers, a chicken sandwich, three drinks, and two sets of fries. For all the talk of conflicting values, the Tesla Diner has assimilated effortlessly into the local custom of charging fries separately from the burger. I have never accepted this tradition, which to me is like ordering a drink and having the bartender pour it into your lap, surprised you wanted a glass. The payment goes through my friend’s fiancé’s mother’s Tesla account, the poor woman accidentally footing the bill. Parents paying is another venerable LA tradition, though one that is rectified with a chain of Venmos at a later date.

While maintaining my general agnosticism on Tesla and Musk, I must confess I have never entered or exited one without some degree of difficulty. The handles lack any intuition; I feel like I must answer their riddles three times every time I pass. I accidentally rolled down part of the window, then gripped the window as I pulled myself out, leaving three greasy fingerprints even before I handled the fries. I attempted to cover my tracks with a T-shirt swab, only to smear the residue further over the window.

I noticed two things as we approached the building to collect our bounty. The first is that, to my Pacific Northwest transplant eyes, the structure looked like the decapitated head of the Space Needle. The second is that, despite the line, it was eerily quiet. Most of the clientele were families of Asian tourists, talking neither to us nor among themselves. This allowed one booming conversation to echo. A family in line bragged that they had come all the way from Ventura (city, they stressed, not the boulevard) to sample the wares. A family from across the Pacific Ocean listened to them politely. 

The only other sound came from the two mammoth screens overlooking the parking lot, broadcasting entertainment for those sitting on the restaurant balcony. It was playing an episode of The Office, though the Tesla screen inside informed us that Space: 1999 was next, inexplicably followed by an episode of The Mindy Project, a show I doubt even Mindy Kaling spares much thought to. Behind the screens are two apartment buildings, undoubtedly ungrateful to such loud and bright entertainment provided free of charge. Their attitude is summed up by a poster in one of the windows, an Obama “Hope” homage, but with Musk and a reference to a female hygiene product.

I was excited to see the interior of Musk’s diner, as I was promised a retrofuturist ambience. It is ironic, after all, that as we ordered from touchscreens in our electric car, we still preferred the 1960s Jetsons notion of the future. The inside of the diner has all the promised chrome and sleekness, but you could find much the same at Disney’s World of Tomorrow, or even an Apple store. We collected our food and decided to try the upstairs balcony for a better vibe. The future is so much safer and more palatable with the cushion of decades; it doesn’t have the indignity of being the present.

At intervals up the winding stairs are three Tesla robots standing sentry behind plexiglass. One of my friends joked that they’re there to remind workers how easily they can be replaced. An initial laugh deflated when we realized that that’s probably true. At the top is a booth hawking merchandise, where, for the cost of my car insurance, I could have purchased my very own hovering cybertruck. We found a table with a view of two screens, flanked at both sides by the visage of an alarmingly young Ian McShane.

It was now time for the true test. To my surprise, the burger was quite good; a gooey mesh of meat and cheese became one flesh. I was surprised at my own surprise; I have long sworn to be in LA but not of LA, yet it seems I have internalized my milieu. I remember the task at hand and tried to focus on further textures and tastes, only to find that it was already gone. I washed it down with some cane sugar cream soda, though slow food prep let the ice cubes melt, and cut it with water. The brittle, eco-friendly bamboo straw is another concession to the community, as are the splinters. This disappointment reoriented me to a stabler ground.

THE EPIC, CHARLTON HESTON, AND THE SMALLNESS OF HOLLYWOOD

The fries are cooked in beef tallow, which three years ago would have been another LA concession but now codes as a facet of RFK Jr.’s plot to send us back to the dark ages. One of my friends gave the highest praise of the afternoon, conceding that “as healthy fries go, I guess they’re not bad.”

As we gazed out at the dueling young McShanes and the glint of the Hollywood Hills that we could make out between them, I felt that great wellspring of goodwill that flows from satiety. I loved the food, I loved the view, I loved the city beneath. I loved the protesters and Musk and all 300 of his children. I loved the workers and their robot overlords, my friends’ and their fiancés and their mothers who don’t know I exist. Even after I negotiated my way back into the Tesla and we drove away, I still had one thought in my mind: Who the hell charges extra for fries?

Joe Joyce is a writer in L.A.