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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Tesla Restaurant

We Now Have More Details on Tesla’s Drive-in Movie Theater Restaurant Plans

When Elon Musk said he wanted a drive-in restaurant, apparently he meant a drive-in movie theater restaurant.

As detailed in the plans filed with the city of Los Angeles, the new Tesla drive-in restaurant will have not one but two movie screens that will show ~30-minute movies (about the time it takes to charge a Tesla). The screens will sit on the north and west property lines and be viewable from both the rooftop area and diners’ vehicles.

You can see what the restaurant (and screens and decorative bamboo poles) might look like in the renderings below:

Below is the description of the drive-in theater portion of the new restaurant from the filing:

Finally, there will be two movie screens for viewing by people charging their cars and/or eating in the restaurant. The movies to be shown will be features lasting approximately the same amount of time as it takes to charge a vehicle (~30 minutes). The two screens will be on both North and West property lines of the site to allow people to view the screens from both their vehicles and from the roof top seating area. A decorative bamboo landscape screen will be planted on the property lines to frame both movie screens. The operational hours for the Drive-In movie theatre will be from 7 am-11 pm pursuant to the Commercial Corner standards

There are many more details, many of which were recently shared by Twitter user MarcoRP with some extra reporting by electric mobility blog Elektrek. Here are some of the particulars and questions we have about the project:

The restaurant will have lots of seating – The theater has lots of built-in seating both inside and outside. There will be two rows of theater seating on the top level, a standing bar area behind the theater seating, and multiple table rounds. On the bottom floor, there will be seating both inside and outside the rotunda-style building. There will also be charging stalls in the parking lot where Tesla owners (and I am assuming lots of non-Tesla owners) will be able to park, order food and watch video on the large screens.

You can see the parking lot schematic with the round restaurant and charging stations in the graphic below:

The restaurant will be on the site of an old Shakey’s – The future location of the Tesla restaurant is where an old (but still operational) Shakey’s restaurant stands today. The address is on Santa Monica Blvd in downtown Hollywood, not the original planned location in the city of Santa Monica near Route 66. The plot size is .565 acres with a large parking lot.

The new restaurant will run 24 hours a day – While the movie viewing hours will be restricted (7 am – 11 pm) to no doubt comply with local ordinances, Tesla wants the dining portion of its futuristic drive-in to rock around the clock.

Most parking spots will have superchargers. Who will be able to park there? – The parking lot will have 34 stalls, with 29 of the stalls having superchargers. It will be interesting to see whether Tesla imposes any restrictions on who can park in the restaurant stalls. Since the restaurant will no doubt draw in lots of tourists, parking stall demand will likely exceed availability. While many visitors will no doubt drive Teslas, chances are more likely will not. My guess is that Tesla will restrict most of the parking stalls for Tesla vehicles.

Still no hard date on opening – The filing doesn’t specify when the new restaurant would be built or open for business. While I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that this project has been gestating since 2018, it is at least encouraging that the company has drawn up plans and looks to have decided on the location.

The first of many? It’s worth wondering if this will be the first of what could be multiple restaurants for Tesla. My guess is that it all depends on how successful this location is. Sure, it’s a showcase location in the middle of Hollywood that will undoubtedly draw in lots of tourists, but I can see Tesla building more of these (or at least a modified version of the concept) as they build out their charging station network.

And Robots? The final question (naturally) is: Will there be robots?

If Tesla Builds a Restaurant, Will It Be Filled With Tesla Robot Servers?

If there’s one thing you could say about Elon Musk, it’s that he never stops surprising us, whether that means smoking weed on podcasts or saying crazy things on Twitter.

But where he is especially surprising – and honestly way more interesting – is with new product reveals.

And his most interesting reveal this year was the Tesla bipedal humanoid robot. The new robot, which Musk teased at Tesla’s AI day, was in retrospect something that we should have expected; after all, Musk is building space ships and human-to-computer brain interfaces for goodness sake. Still, most of us were a little surprised, at least mainly because you’d think a guy who is trying to go to space and build brain implants would be too busy to build a robot.

Another surprise this year was the Tesla restaurant. The restaurant concept, uncovered via a Trademark search, was something Musk mused about in 2018 when he talked about creating an old-fashioned carhop which would feature high-tech touches like pop-up menus and Tesla charging stations.

And maybe robots? Nowadays, restaurants deploy front-of-house restaurants bots like Servi to move trays of food around and bus tables. Using robots in a carhop restaurant, where navigating back and forth to cars on pavement, seems like a comparably easy task.

It’s something Musk and his team has no doubt discussed. What I’m less sure about is whether any robot servers at Tesla restaurants would be humanoid. The current generation of front-of-house bots roll around on wheels, a mode of mobility that is a much easier engineering task than building a humanoid walking around a busy fast-food foodservice environment.

But who knows? Musk almost always aims for the stars – literally and figuratively – with his ideas, so building a restaurant with C3POs walking around delivering burgers and fries seems on-brand for the world’s well-known – and most surprising – tech entrepreneur.