At Kitchensurfing, Booking a Chef and a Story

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

HOME COOKING Lany Phlong is one of the chefs available through Kitchensurfing.

She had never worked in a restaurant or gone to culinary school, but there she was on a recent Thursday night, buzzing up to a stranger's apartment in Astoria, Queens, carrying equipment and fresh groceries from Chinatown. She took command of her host's small kitchen: cleaning bok choy and pea shoots, cutting sirloin, peeling prawns.

She served him and his three guests a boiling yah hawn, a Cambodian hot pot, and returned to the kitchen, standing idly by — until the friends invited her to join them.

As they dipped raw meat into the hot broth, Lany Phlong told her story: She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand 32 years ago. Her parents had escaped the Khmer Rouge. And last year, tired of her career in marketing, she had flown to Cambodia for the first time to meet her grandparents and to learn to cook Cambodian cuisine authentically. Yah hawn was a recipe she brought back.

She described ingredients to them. "This is morning glory, a common green in Cambodia," she recalled explaining. "And these are quail eggs — you can get them at this street in Chinatown."

This spontaneous cultural and culinary encounter was brought about by Kitchensurfing, a start-up business trying to make it as easy to find a private chef online as it is to book a room or order a book. The dinner's host arranged the meal by browsing Kitchensurfing's database of profiled chefs, who range from slick, credentialed professionals with years of restaurant experience to self-taught cooks like Ms. Phlong.

The site actively seeks out such homegrown chefs, posting fliers — "Do you like to Cook Tibetan & Nepali Food, Use the Internet, & Enjoy Making $$$?" — in ethnic neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Queens, and in the lobbies of English-language schools. It also scours Craigslist postings and social media.

Bookings are all-inclusive: payment is up front and includes tip. Cooks do the shopping and, as Ms. Phlong did that night, clean up before they leave.

Kitchensurfing started in May and now receives several bookings a day in New York and Berlin, where two of the founders used to live. On the second floor of its town house headquarters in Gowanus, Brooklyn, seven employees quietly tap away on laptops, embodying the image of a scrappy, caffeinated start-up at work. The boyish-looking 30-year-old sitting behind a large computer screen is Chris Muscarella, the site's chief executive.

Mr. Muscarella, originally from Framingham, Mass., has led a textured life. He was a precocious teenager with a knack for programming and landed his first job as a software engineer at age 18. He held off on college to live in Beijing and study meditation and martial arts. And he spent his 20s in the start-up world, including helping to found Mobile Commons, a mobile marketing and text-messaging platform used by businesses, nonprofits and political campaigns.

By 2009, though, Mr. Muscarella thought he was burned out from the technology business, and in 2011, he helped open Rucola, a Northern Italian restaurant in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

He was startled by what he saw of the grind of kitchen life and the low compensation of cooks. "I feel confident enough saying this," he said. "You're probably statistically more likely to make it to the N.B.A. than you are to be a chef that makes $100,000 a year or more." Around this time he hired a private chef to cater a dinner at his home, and his entrepreneurial mind clicked.

Most private chefs earn more than those who work in restaurants, he said, but finding clients can be challenging. So why not create an outlet for them? Conversely, what consumer wouldn't be attracted to the idea of having a private chef — if the luxury could be made accessible?

He then met Lars Kluge, 30, a programmer, and Borahm Cho, 28, a designer, both from Germany, who had been mulling over similar notions, and they founded Kitchensurfing together.

Their company follows a wave of start-ups trying to create peer-to-peer marketplaces for common services. Airbnb has become a household name and achieved a multibillion-dollar valuation by connecting people who need a place to stay with people who have an extra room or apartment to let out. Uber, a smartphone app, allows users to summon a town car with the touch of a screen.

Mr. Muscarella acknowledged a debt to such innovators but said his company's ambitions were different. "It's more meaningful," he said. "It's cool to get a cab like it was a magic wand, but you're not going to be talking about that for two weeks. You will still be talking about the amazing eating experience you had."

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