Kitchit Lets You Hire World Class Chefs for Dinner Parties
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Your next dinner party could be hosted by a Mario Batali veteran. Thanks to the brains (and stomachs) of Stanford alums Brendan Marshall, Ian Ferguson, and George Tang and their start-up website Kitchit, hosts and party planners can hire well-known chefs for top notch meals.
Consider Chirstopher Kim, another Stanford alumnus, who told Bloomberg BusinessWeek he used Kitchit to plan a tailgate party against rival University of California-Berkeley. After perusing the site’s selection of top talent in the area, he booked a private chef. The chef arrived with a 56-pound smoked pig, baked beans, potato salad, and corn bread for the 52 fans who made it to the party, and who after seeing the meal, were less inclined to head to the game.
Perhaps you better identify with Karla Gallardo, who nabbed chef Danny Guerrini from the site to prepare an Argentinian asada-style feast, without pork, for her boyfriend’s birthday. Maybe you’re more of a table-for-two, French cuisine type of diner or prefer outdoor dinners prepped with garden fresh veggies.
In any case, Kitchit has a chef and a meal perfect for you, offering “expert renditions of feel-good classics to the envelope-pushing fare you’d expect at top-flight restaurants.” Users simply sign up for the service, browse the site for the chef most apt for your party, and book. Then, chefs will shop for ingredients, prepare the meal, and clean while you indulge and enjoy. Billing, payment, and contact with chefs are all done through the website. It’s as easy as the pie you’ll consume for dessert and as pricey as you want to make it.
“Casual dinners” begin at $25 per head, and formal six-course meals (complete with linens and flower arrangements) can cost up to $200 per person. But as the start-up states, they consider “catering” to be a bad word; every aspect is custom-tailored to your event and taste-buds.
“Catering businesses are scattered around the Internet, and you have no idea if the service is going to be good or bad,” Gallardo told BusinessWeek. “[At Kitchit], everything is customized for you.”
This is the idea Kitchit’s founders had in mind.
“We wanted to help people with dinner parties in the home and take the pain out of finding what you are going to cook, how much time you have, and what the best sources for all these different ingredients are,” Marshall said in BusinessWeek. “Chefs have the answers to all these questions. We can bring chefs to these people.”
With the company’s initial success, Kitchit is bringing its service to other cities. First serving only San Francisco Bay Area customers, Kitchit brought Los Angeles to the table on Tuesday. New York, Boston, and Chicago are next on the invite list. And the party’s only going to get bigger.
“We have gotten unsolicited requests from chefs in geographies you wouldn’t expect,” Ferguson told BusinessWeek. “Once we’re at scale, there’s no reason we couldn’t [bring it to those places.]“
St. Patrick’s Day, anyone?
