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 The kitchensurfing.com domain was subsequently re-registered by an unrelated cooking-products affiliate publisher and no longer represents this company.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.

5.7/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-08-20 · rubric v0.12.0
0 APIs
CompanyDefunctFood and BeverageMarketplaceOn-DemandHospitalityLocal ServicesConsumerVenture Backed

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-08-20 · rubric v0.12.0
Composite quality — 5.7/100 · minimal
Contract Quality 0.0 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 20
Access Clarity 0.0 / 20
Operational Transparency 0.7 / 13
Contract Governance 0.0 / 12
Discoverability 5.0 / 10
Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only
Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10
Documented Reversibility 0 / 6
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
A2A Agent Card 0 / 8
Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4
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: '0.23'
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