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 The kitchensurfing.com domain was subsequently re-registered by an unrelated cooking-products affiliate publisher and no longer represents this company.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.
Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the
Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so
Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite.
If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your
provider repo — the
applicability map is public and we will correct it.
Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for
this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero:
never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and
several others — scorable at all.
The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them,
because the conditional facet above carries the other
15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped
maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal
weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.
aid: kitchensurfing
deliveryModel:
model: unknown
open_source: false
commercial: false
callable_host: false
label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
confidence: low
source:
- none
generated: '2026-08-28'
method: derived
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: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-19'
tags:
- Company
- Defunct
- Food and Beverage
- Marketplace
- On-Demand
- Hospitality
- Local Services
- Consumer
- Venture Backed
tags_raw:
- 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
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