What might a Tesla restaurant look like?

When normal people plan to open a restaurant they look at finance, scout for locations and draft menus. When Elon Musk does it he files a patent. But then Elon Musk isn’t normal. He builds rockets for space and electric cars for planet Earth, is a 49-year-old entrepreneur, one of the richest men in the world, who can cause mass chaos by simply posting a broken heart emoji on Twitter (the value of Bitcoin plummeted seven per cent last month after he cast doubt on the cryptocurrency to his 56.8 million followers).

So when he moots an interest in the hospitality scene, us restaurant watchers and diners had better take note. His declaration of intent comes in an application to the US Patent and Trademark Office to use the T logo of his Tesla Inc electric car and clean energy company and other iterations of the Tesla logo for ‘restaurant services, pop-up restaurant services, self-service restaurant services', and 'take-out restaurant services.’

Experience suggests that Musk doesn’t enter business lightly. Born in South Africa, having emigrated to Canada at the age of 17, he graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He then moved swiftly into the internet start-up world of Silicon Valley and by 2002, as the largest shareholder in PayPal, he received over $100 million when it was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion.

Since then his preoccupations have included SpaceX, for which the likes of testing of satellites and building rockets has cost around £10 billion.

If Musk wants to dabble in hospitality it stands to reason he’s not planning a cosy neighbourhood joint near his home in Austin, Texas. One of the world’s greatest innovators, he thinks big.

When the LA traffic got on his nerves he conceived a series of 3D tunnels deep underground where cars ran on electric skates at 130mph to alleviate congestion above ground (the idea of flying cars being, he said, ‘not an anxiety-reducing situation’).

He built a hyperloop test track at SpaceX, something he called ‘a hobby thing’, which turns out to be the second largest vacuum chamber in the world after the Large Hadron Collider. He’s planning the world’s fastest bullet train, solar panels on all homes across the world (‘economically a no brainer [with] a warranty of infinity’), and giga factories building lithium batteries in every country (‘we need to address a global market’), in which the first one already built has a conveyor belt spewing out such batteries so fast that you need a strobe light to see them.

Given his presence in the electric car market and his related patent applications it’s safe to assume Musk is planning his restaurants to be adjacent to his Tesla charging points. And his timing is apt. As Radio 4’s Business Daily reported earlier this week the writing is on the wall for traditional gas stations across the world. With the rise of electric cars such establishments could be gone in just two decades.

And since charging is still a great deal slower than a simple fill of the tank with petrol or diesel as truck drivers, a bite at a Tesla diner seems an apt way to kill the time. Indeed with truck drivers legally bound to stop every 300 miles for 45 minutes that could be a couple of courses and pudding.

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But what might the restaurants look like, what food would they serve, how would service operate and how might we pay?

In 2018 Musk tweeted that he was considering installing an ‘old-school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant’ at one of the new Tesla supercharger stations in LA. So perhaps the look will be a sort of futuristic 50s retro vibe, all gleaming chrome and neon lights.

The only time he’s revealed any personal food preferences was in 2015, prior to the launch of Falcon 1, when he mentioned ‘French and BBQ’. Does that suggest a menu of confit de canard, cassoulet, salad Niçoise and chocolate mousse with fillets of beef and hamburgers grilled to order?

Given his passion for sustainability, each diner will doubtless have a bug farm at the back where insects gorge on the previous day’s food waste, those creatures in turn being turned into biscuits, cakes and shakes.

My bet is on a large number of vegan dishes with any meat being produced from cultured proteins produced in bioreactors. No old-style cuts culled from actual animals.

And given that Musk lived for a time, aged 17, on a dollar a day in Canada he’d pay homage to less well-off diners with a nostalgic hot dogs and oranges one-dollar meal deal.

Menus would, naturally, pop up on your smart phone, and it goes without saying that no money would change hands. If you haven’t paid via your mobile the very act of charging your car would probably merit Tesla dining credits so you’d eat for free anyway.

But with Musk’s ambition I would expect to see Tesla restaurants created with a nod to the rockets. Snazzy restaurants in awesome locations: in glass domes at the bottom of the ocean, at the top of skycrapers, above the clouds accessed by the world’s fastest lifts and in tempered glass hovering over erupting volcanoes.

Meanwhile his application for ‘pop-up’ services suggests mobile trucks, Tesla food festivals or supper clubs in your back yard as well as, obviously, drone deliveries.

The film director Jon Favreau once described Musk as ‘a Renaissance man… a paragon of enthusiasm, humour and curiosity,’ which sounds like some of the great chefs and restaurateurs I know.

‘If we go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic,’ Musk once said. With him in the kitchen dining out could get quite exciting.

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