Kitchensurfing website screenshot

Kitchensurfing

Kitchensurfing was a New York City marketplace that booked professional chefs to shop for, cook, and serve meals in customers' own kitchens, founded in 2012 and backed by roughly $20M from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tiger Global. It began as an advance-booking platform for private dinner parties and pivoted in 2015 to a flat-rate on-demand model in which a chef arrived and cooked dinner within a fixed window. Neither model produced sustainable demand against better-capitalized meal-kit and delivery competitors, and the company discontinued service and shut down on April 15, 2016. It never published a public developer API, SDK, or developer portal. Its GitHub organization survives with eleven public repositories - open-source Ruby/Rails forks and internal hackathon projects, last active in 2016 - but contains no client library or API definition. The kitchensurfing.com domain was subsequently re-registered by an unrelated cooking-products affiliate publisher and no longer represents this company.

Kitchensurfing is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Defunct, Food and Beverage, Marketplace, and On Demand.

Kitchensurfing’s developer surface includes product news and 5 more developer resources.

7.4/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
0 APIs
CompanyDefunctFood and BeverageMarketplaceOn DemandHospitalityLocal ServicesConsumerVenture Backed

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 7.4/100 · minimal
Contract Quality 0.0 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 20
Commercial Clarity 0.0 / 20
Operational Transparency 0.7 / 13
Governance 0.0 / 12
Discoverability 6.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only
Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 0 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/kitchensurfing: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Want it done for you? Prioritized profiling — $2,500 →

Resources

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Company 3

The organization behind the API

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Source (apis.yml)

apis.yml Raw ↑
aid: kitchensurfing
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/kitchensurfing.png
name: Kitchensurfing
description: Kitchensurfing was a New York City marketplace that booked professional chefs to shop for, cook, and serve meals
  in customers' own kitchens, founded in 2012 and backed by roughly $20M from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tiger
  Global. It began as an advance-booking platform for private dinner parties and pivoted in 2015 to a flat-rate on-demand
  model in which a chef arrived and cooked dinner within a fixed window. Neither model produced sustainable demand against
  better-capitalized meal-kit and delivery competitors, and the company discontinued service and shut down on April 15, 2016.
  It never published a public developer API, SDK, or developer portal. Its GitHub organization survives with eleven public
  repositories - open-source Ruby/Rails forks and internal hackathon projects, last active in 2016 - but contains no client
  library or API definition. The kitchensurfing.com domain was subsequently re-registered by an unrelated cooking-products
  affiliate publisher and no longer represents this company.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/kitchensurfing/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- union-square-ventures
- spark-capital
- tiger-global
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: defunct-no-api
x-status: defunct
x-defunct-date: '2016-04-15'
x-founded: '2012'
x-headquarters: New York, NY, United States
x-domain-status: reregistered-unrelated
x-enrichment-note: Enriched 2026-07-19. Company confirmed defunct since 2016-04-15; no API, SDK, developer portal, or event
  surface was ever published. Live kitchensurfing.com is an unrelated affiliate content site, so no artifacts (packages, well-known,
  mcp, llms, openapi, security) were generated - absence is the correct, verified result. Do not re-run the artifact pipeline
  on this slug.
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-19'
tags:
- Company
- Defunct
- Food and Beverage
- Marketplace
- On Demand
- Hospitality
- Local Services
- Consumer
- Venture Backed
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
common:
- type: Website
  name: kitchensurfing.com - domain re-registered by an unrelated cooking-products publisher, NOT the original company
  url: https://www.kitchensurfing.com/
- type: Archive
  name: Kitchensurfing original site, Internet Archive snapshot (2016-04-01)
  url: http://web.archive.org/web/20160401035206/https://www.kitchensurfing.com/
- type: GitHubOrganization
  name: Kitchensurfing on GitHub - 11 public repos, last active 2016, forks and internal projects, no SDK or API definition
  url: https://github.com/kitchensurfing
- type: News
  name: 'Recode: On-demand chef service Kitchensurfing shuts down (2016-04-15)'
  url: https://www.recode.net/2016/4/15/11586178/on-demand-chef-service-kitchensurfing-shuts-down
- type: News
  name: 'Fast Company: After raising $20M, Kitchensurfing closes'
  url: https://www.fastcompany.com/4003566/after-raising-20m-kitchensurfing-closes-2
- type: Profile
  name: Kitchensurfing company profile on CB Insights
  url: https://www.cbinsights.com/company/kitchensurfing
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-19'
  status: backfilled
  pass: local-v1
  note: backfilled from .gitignore signal + verified work evidence