Next Up in Fine Dining: Pay in Advance

(Corrects the age of the restaurant Alinea.)

Nick Kokonas got the idea for his new reservation system while listening to phones ring off the hook at his current bastion of haute cuisine, Chicago's Alinea. "If you sit in that room for a day, you'll think of it," Kokonas says. "All you have to do is hear Emily and Amanda say, 'Sorry, we're full. Sorry, we're full.'" Instead of paying reservationists to perform customer relations that were inadvertently "pissing customers off," Kokonas came up with a revolutionary concept: an entire restaurant that wouldn't piss anyone off. There would be no hounding for reservations, and no bill dropped at the end of the meal. Kokonas has now built that restaurant—and he's even figured out an algorithm to determine the price of dinner.