Kitchn is a direct online ordering platform for independent restaurants, founded in 2025 in Sterling, Virginia. It gives restaurants a branded digital menu, online payments, pickup, delivery and catering ordering, plus one dashboard to run it all, with no marketplace commissions: plans start free, and a small per-order fee is paid by the guest.
Because two of us were paying for the problem every single day.
Tamim and Masoud Shoja have spent their lives in restaurants, as owners, operators and the people who close up when the last ticket clears. When online ordering became the way guests wanted to buy, the options were blunt: hand the third-party apps up to 30% of every order and the customer relationship with it, or bolt on a generic ordering widget that looked nothing like the restaurant and told you nothing about who was buying.
They wanted a third option: a direct channel that grows the restaurant's own online sales, keeps the guest data in the restaurant's hands, and feels as polished as the ordering experiences big chains spend millions on.
That is where Abid Ghaffer came in. With more than a decade building cloud-native systems for regulated industries, Abid took the operating pain Tamim and Masoud knew firsthand and turned it into the platform. Kitchn was founded in 2025. The two restaurant owners set the requirements; the engineer ships them.
Most restaurant software is built by people who have never run a Friday dinner rush. Kitchn is built by people who still do. That changes what gets built and in what order:
Three co-founders, one operating model: the restaurant owners decide what matters, the engineer makes it real.
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Abid builds and runs the Kitchn platform: the ordering storefront, the operator dashboard, payments and delivery integrations, and the infrastructure underneath. He brings 10+ years of cloud-native engineering on AWS and Azure, most recently in real estate finance, and holds a BS in Computer Science from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. His standard for Kitchn is simple: it has to be as reliable as a POS and as easy as a phone.
Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer
Tamim is a restaurant owner with a lifelong background in the business, and leads how Kitchn shows up in the world: the brand, the marketing, and the story restaurants hear when they first meet us. He is also the platform's toughest user: if a feature doesn't earn its place on his own menu, it doesn't ship.
Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer
Masoud is a restaurant owner with a lifelong background in the business, and leads revenue, partnerships and restaurant onboarding at Kitchn. He has sat on the other side of every software sales pitch a restaurant gets, which is why Kitchn's onboarding is designed to get a restaurant live in minutes, not weeks.
Restaurants should own their orders. Third-party platforms can bring sales, but they take control of your customers and your margins. Direct ordering keeps more of every sale with the business.
Great ordering should feel premium. Guests are used to smooth online ordering from big brands. Independent restaurants deserve the same: rich menu visuals, easy customization, simple checkout and live order updates.
Better data makes better restaurants. Owners need to see what's selling, what guests spend and where growth is coming from, in one place, not spread across apps.
| Founded | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Sterling, Virginia (Washington, DC metro) |
| Founders | Abid Ghaffer (CTO), Tamim Shoja (CMO), Masoud Shoja (CRO) |
| What we make | Direct online ordering, digital menus, pickup & delivery, catering (CaterCart), marketing tools and analytics for independent restaurants |
| Pricing model | Retail plans from free to $300/month; CaterCart from $100/month. No marketplace commissions: Kitchn's per-order fee (5% on retail orders, $7 on catering orders) is paid by the guest at checkout. |
| Payments | Processed by Stripe. Most orders pay directly into the restaurant's own Stripe account; orders delivered by our courier partner are charged by Kitchn and the restaurant's share is transferred. |
| Ownership | Independent and founder-owned; not owned by any delivery marketplace |
Kitchn was founded in 2025 by three co-founders: Abid Ghaffer (Chief Technology Officer), Tamim Shoja (Chief Marketing Officer) and Masoud Shoja (Chief Revenue Officer). Tamim and Masoud are restaurant owners; Abid is a cloud engineer who builds the platform.
No. Kitchn is independently owned by its three co-founders and is not owned by any third-party marketplace. Orders and customer data belong to the restaurant.
Yes. Two of the three co-founders, Tamim Shoja and Masoud Shoja, own and operate restaurants and use Kitchn in their own locations. Features are tested in a working kitchen before they ship.
Third-party apps take a commission from every order and keep the customer relationship. Kitchn takes no commission from the restaurant: plans start free, a small per-order fee is paid by the guest at checkout, most payments land directly in the restaurant's own Stripe account, and the restaurant gets its own branded ordering channel, customer list and analytics.
Kitchn is headquartered in Sterling, Virginia, in the Washington, DC metro area, and serves independent restaurants across the United States.
Whether you want a demo or just want to compare notes with owners who have been where you are, we answer our own inbox.
See pricing, read the product FAQ, or explore CaterCart for catering orders.
