AllThingsD » Chef

Want to Lunch Like Larry or Snack Like Sergey? Kitchit Launches the NetJets for Personal Chefs. (Video)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:01:42 +0000

Imagine lifting the silver lid on a carefully prepared, elegantly plated and perfectly seasoned culinary masterpiece, only to realize … your dog is pawing at your leg, begging for a bite.

That experience, or something like it, is precisely what the new start-up Kitchit is trying to bring to its users’ homes.

Launching today, in invite-only beta, the Web service allows anyone with a credit card to book a top-tier chef to prepare the meal at their next dinner party.

The company, which was part of Stanford’s StartX incubator program, just finished raising a seed round of funding. The value of the round is undisclosed, but it counts super-angel Dave McClure among the early investors.

The three founders — CEO Brendan Marshall, CTO George Tang and Chief of Product Ian Ferguson — came together months ago to build a business around the idea of “democratizing fine dining,” said Marshall.

Buzzwords aside, Kitchit is opening up what was a previously gray market of transactions made by foodie insiders — or people who happened to have the connections necessary to find chefs who were looking to make extra money cooking outside the confines of their primary jobs at high-end restaurants.

With Kitchit, even a fish-stick aficionado can arrange for such a meal.

It’s the exact same kind of hidden economy that companies like Airbnb have built a business on disrupting.

But what does this new opportunity mean for the user/eater?

Potential diners visit Kitchit.com and pick from a stable of preapproved chefs — about 40 at last count — who will prepare their haute cuisine in the client’s home for any number of guests.

Kitchit takes care of billing, scheduling and making the connection with the chef, taking a cut of the payment.

The end result, said Ferguson, is “a five-star meal cooked for you and your guests in your home, for less than you would pay in a restaurant.”

And while the prices fluctuate with the cost of ingredients and demands of individual chefs, Ferguson’s math does seem to hold, even if it doesn’t promise an enormous bargain.

He explained that the average per-plate cost of a Kitchit dinner party is somewhere between $50 and $100.

Still, being able to eat at home and drink wine without a restaurant’s precious liquor markup must mean some savings, right?

While it’s tempting to draw an immediate correlation between Kitchit and a company such as Airbnb, CEO Marshall insisted the two were after different markets.

“We’re really more like NetJets for now,” he said.

Beyond the initial focus on high-end dining, Kitchit faces some sobering costs of scaling that Airbnb doesn’t.

For one, the cost of onboarding new chefs is high.

Ferguson noted that many chefs “don’t do a great job of writing their own bios, and few have enough high-quality photos of dishes they’ve prepared — but that’s also exactly why Kitchit can succeed.”

Kitchit, in a sense, has to serve two masters, at least according to Ferguson.

“Our chefs need to see value in using Kitchit, as well,” he said. “It has to make their lives easier, and make it possible for them to make extra money more reliably than other methods.”

And while the eating public never sees it, Kitchit provides a management interface and a host of other services to chefs who book events using the platform.

Kitchit has also started negotiating bulk deals on certain expensive ingredients, such as caviar, so that it can drive the cost of dinner parties down further.

As for what’s next, its founders said the company will spend its time and money growing the stable of chefs and expanding to other markets.

That’s in addition to plenty of “delicious business development meetings,” said Ferguson.

The trio of well-fed founders recently sat down for a fairly lengthy video chat about the launch of Kitchit and the difficulties of building a tech business that sells such an analog service:

[ See post to watch video ]

EA's Playfish Cooks Up Sponsorship With British Chef Jamie Oliver

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 19 May 2011 09:00:49 +0000

Electronic Art’s Playfish is partnering with Celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver to bring his brand–and specifically a virtual pasta maker–to its social game Restaurant City.

As social games attract large user bases, it is increasingly common for advertisers to sponsor virtual goods to get in front of a very engaged audience.

The most high-profile example lately was this week’s launch of GagaVille, a Lady Gaga-inspired farm on FarmVille, Zynga’s popular social game.

In both cases, the sponsorships have been in older games, which are having a hard time attracting as many daily users as they once did. It’s unclear whether injecting high-profile brands into the games will help players reconnect or attract new players.

In the case of GagaVille, players have the chance to unlock songs from the pop star’s album coming out next week. After launching, FarmVille appeared on Facebook’s list of top performers for the week, reports InsideSocialGames. It gained 88,736 daily users to hit a total of 11.3 million.

As part of the Jamie Oliver promotion, players on Restaurant City will have to collect multiple ingredients in order to make recipes from the celebrity chef, such as Farfalle Carbonara, Asparagus Fettuccine, Basil Pesto Pasta and Meatball Pasta. Virtual goods will include the Jamie Oliver Pasta Maker.

Ultimately, players will be directed to a link to visit Jamie Oliver’s site, where they can learn how to make the recipes at home.

“Really the strategy is two-fold: to provide something fun and engaging with a brand people can feel good about. It’s also an opportunity for us to reach a whole new set of players, who are fans of him,” said Tom Sarris, Playfish’s director of global communications.

Restaurant City attracts nearly six million monthly users and 1.4 million daily users. It registered one notch higher than FarmVille on this week’s list of top gainers, coming in at number 12.

The promotion corresponds with the new TV show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” which airs in both the U.S. and the U.K., and addresses concerns about obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Kara's TED Video: No Sarah Silverman Cussing, but–Shocker–Rob Glaser Touts Bill Gates!

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:18:55 +0000

For goodness sakes, the controversy over Sarah Silverman’s appearance at the tail end of the TED conference last week can be distilled to this:

You either like the gutter-mouthed comic or you don’t.

BoomTown does and thinks the whole bit about adopting a mentally-challenged kid was very funny, although decidedly sick. If you listen to even a tiny bit of her act, this is pretty much what you might expect to hear from Silverman.

But, we press on!

Here’s a video I did from the event, the highlights of which were Nathan Myhrvold’s demo in which he lasered mosquitoes, Jake Shimabukuro’s masterful ukulele playing, chef Jamie Oliver’s wish for better nutrition and a lessening of obesity, and, perhaps, Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder and now megaphilanthropist Bill Gates’s interesting focus on stopping all CO2 emissions stat.

You can see the Oliver video below, and the rest of the talks soon on the TED site.

And here’s my video, in which I take a tour around TED and interview a variety of folks, including former RealNetworks (RNWK) CEO Rob Glaser–who used to work for Microsoft–praising Gates’s speech:

[ See post to watch video ]

RIP, Soul Men

Beth Callaghan — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:00:50 +0000

Since John Paczkowski’s still out of range, Beth Callaghan will be posting Digital Daily today.

In a stunning turn of events over the weekend, both Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes passed away–Mac of complications from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease, and Hayes from as-yet unknown causes.

The immediate impact and response, of course, is displayed on the Web, with the now-customary ritual proliferation of tribute videos on YouTube–at last count, there were 188,000 for Isaac Hayes and 137,000 for Bernie Mac.

Legendary music icon Hayes was primarily known as the embodiment of ’70s soul. As composer of “Theme from Shaft,” he won a Grammy and established himself as the king of old-school cool. To younger generations, he’ll be remembered as the voice of “Chef” on Comedy Central’s “South Park”–a role he played from 1997-2006. Hayes was 65.

Still-rising star Bernie Mac reached prominence in Spike Lee’s 2000 film “The Original Kings of Comedy,” and starred in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Eleven” films. His own sitcom, “The Bernie Mac Show,” ran from 2001 to 2006. His cutting-edge brand of humor set him apart from his contemporaries, and often received attention from critics. Mac was recently scolded by Barack Obama’s campaign after a surprise appearance at a fund-raiser for the presidential candidate during which he used crude language. He was 50.

The two had recently been shooting a film, “Soul Men,” in which they were starring alongside Samuel L. Jackson.