“A MAN WORTH KILLING”
NICK KOKONAS HAS AN UNCANNY ability to find an unexpected solution to an illogical situation. This talent enabled him to thrive as a financial trader, and then, despite no industry experience, to cocreate one of the world’s best restaurants and launch a tech company that’s been a game-changer in how dining reservations are made. But it can also rub people the wrong way. At home, for instance.
Dagmara Kokonas, his wife of 24 years, had grown tired of umbrellas going AWOL from their usual spots by the front and back doors. This was Nick’s fault. So Dagmara did what spouses do: She told her husband to quit losing umbrellas.
And Nick did what Nick does: He went on the website Alibaba, found a great deal on compact blue umbrellas, and bought boxes and boxes of them — 288 umbrellas in all. Then he placed one in every spot that Dagmara or their two sons might hope to find an umbrella, and he stashed the remaining boxes in the basement and at Alinea’s storage facility. When he sees that an umbrella is missing, he replaces it with another, so Dagmara never knows how many the family has gone through.
To Nick, he’d solved the problem. He made sure no one in his household would ever lack for an umbrella, and he got Dagmara off his back. But Dagmara didn’t want Nick to solve the problem. She wanted him to quit losing umbrellas. “We have a responsibility to our things and our home and our umbrellas, right?” she says.
“She’s right. You shouldn’t lose umbrellas,” Nick says with an exaggerated sigh. “But I have other, higher-priority things I like to spend my time worrying about than where I put the last umbrella.”
KOKONAS, A YOUTHFUL 51 WITH TOUSLED GRAYING HAIR AND A CASUAL ease about him, has accumulated much to worry about. He’s co-owner and cofounder of the Alinea Group, the company that he and star chef Grant Achatz have built atop the foundation of their wildly creative, internationally acclaimed restaurant Alinea. He’s also the CEO of Tock, a dining reservations system he launched in 2014 that has raised $18 million in funding and has a client list of 2,000-and-counting restaurants and wineries in 24 countries.
From the Alinea Group’s spacious open office in a converted West Loop factory, he oversees it all — about 120 employees onsite and close to 400 in total. His big-windowed corner office has such a close-up view of passing Metra and Amtrak trains that he and the conductors wave to each other. The white walls are bare, other than some whiteboard notes from a previous meeting. On an end table sits a compact blue umbrella.
This is the first time he’s ever had an office, he says, dismissing it as “a prison of my own construction.” So he is constantly in motion: He stops by people’s desks and pets their dogs,
