ONLY in textbooks do businesses start because an entrepreneur studiously analyzes a market, discovers a hole, makes a plan for filling it and goes into action. Julie Rose was an aspiring but unemployed producer, a former musician and a sometime caterer when she got a message on her answering machine saying that the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center was looking for a concessionaire to serve its patrons.

”I didn’t even know what the Mitzi was,” Ms. Rose said. ”I looked in The New Yorker to find out and saw that David Mamet was playing there. So I thought maybe this is big.”

Only something big could have stopped her from leaving the food business, with its grueling parties and 24-hour workdays. She presented a proposal for the concession. ”It was a lark,” Ms. Rose said. ”I figured if it doesn’t work, who cares.” A year and a half later, Ms. Rose, 29 years old, and her friend Arnie Bieber, 33, are running a thriving business called Sweet Feast that sells snacks to patrons of both the Newhouse and the Vivian Beaumont theaters. Unlike most theater fare in New York, their food is healthy and sufficiently filling that an enterprising theatergoer could make a meal of it. Sweet Feast recently won the concession for the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, Calif., and is bidding for spots in the New York City park system.

For Lincoln Center, Sweet Feast is a godsend. The major companies that deal with other New York theaters serve mostly candy and liquor. For Lincoln Center, the food had to be special, more substantial. ”Professional concessionaires know how to make money,” said Bernard Gersten, executive producer of the Lincoln Center Theater, which oversees both the Newhouse and the Beaumont. ”Because they were so rigid, they knew exactly the way to do it, and that was exactly the way we did not want to do it. We preferred someone who was more oriented to our customers.”

The theaters’ administrators considered running the concession themselves but, Mr. Gersten said, ”We calculated we would lose money – it’s a lousy business.” Or so they thought, even when the business’s address was Lincoln Center. The administrators did not know where to turn. Then, in a kind of offstage Cinderella story, someone who knew Ms. Rose suggested calling her. She turned in a one-page proposal promising healthy food, and that was that.

As it turned out, it isn’t such a lousy business. Sweet Feast makes a profit and pays a salary to Ms. Rose and to a manager. About five part-time workers staff the brass-fronted, marble-topped stand in the lobby of the Beaumont. Black buckets hold champagne and paper streamers. Theatergoers can even twirl plastic fluted champagne glasses.

Sandwiches made with whole-wheat rolls and brie are held together with tomato-topped toothpicks. Piled under plastic domes are sweets like brownies and slices of lemon poundcake. There are candies, nuts and dried and fresh fruits, as well as fruit juices, liquor, soft drinks and coffee.

The business has peculiar limitations. All sales must be made during the half-hour before the show or during the 15-minute intermission, but the workers must be paid for several hours. Sweet Feast’s performance dovetails with events on stage. The concession started during two short David Mamet plays.

”Nobody comes out famished from watching a play for 20 minutes,” Mr. Bieber said.

And mood matters. ”They didn’t like the show,” Ms. Rose said. ”We don’t sell as much if they’re in bad moods.” Intellectual crowds, she said, don’t drink much. ”But kids buy like crazy. We love them.”

Ms. Rose works full time at Sweet Feast, while Mr. Bieber has continued to teach music at Riverdale Junior High School. When they started the business, they knew only that they wanted to sell the healthy food they would eat. Even though fruit and sandwiches do not make money because of spoilage costs, she will not take them off the menu.

The two entrepreneurs knew so little about the business that they first went to the concession at the Public Theater and wrote down all the prices so they could figure out what to charge. ”We had no idea what we were getting into – we didn’t even know where to get the stuff,” Mr. Bieber said. At first, his mother helped by making about five quiches a week in her kitchen; Ms. Rose made the brownies. Now, they buy quiche from Quiche ‘N Tell and desserts from Ms. Desserts.

“Starting the business cost me just five hundred dollars. I had done a lot of research on all the best caterers and discovered that the one who did the most business didn’t have better food. It was the presentation that was so importan! So I bought a gorgeous platter, lovely coffee urns, and lots of silk flowers. Oh, and food too. The flowers have become our signature. Pricing wasn’t too difficult. I asked a friend, who said you charge two or three times the cost of goods. Coffee and liquor are marked up more.

“I used to think business was disgusting. It isn’t at all. Owning your own company is creative, inspiring. It’s not the money that drives you. It’s the fun and the recognition and the excitement that come with being good at what you’re doing. At a certain point, the money does become more important, though, because you want to keep doing what you’re doing. And then you’re responsible for the livelihood of other people. At various times, we have between twenty and thirty employees working for us!”

Julie Rose always wanted to break into theater, but she never dreamed she’d do it with Toll House cookie bars. Rose, an aspiring musician and producer who worked part-time for a New York City caterer, had no interest in entrepreneurship. Then one day in 1986, the house manager at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in lincoln Center called the catering company and asked if they would like to run the theater’s concession stand. When her employer turned the job down, Rose decided she might like to run the concession herself. After presenting her ideas to the house manager, she won the bid for the stand. The next thing she knew, she was in business and off to the theater.

Improving the sales performance in lincoln Center’s 290seat theater wouldn’t be too hard, thought Rose: “They were pulling in $10 to $15 a night pushing stale candy and soda.” The real challenge would be covering costs and making a decent profit in the slivers of time before performances and during intermission. Rose had a total window of about 45 minutes to sell out her goods. Her strategy: provide an elegant presentation of sweets and savory baked goods. Before setting up shop, Rose called a baker friend for recipes and spent about $500 on eyecatching serving platters. Soon she was busy baking all day and selling all night. Within the first month, Rose was grossing $400 to $600 a week. Today her company, Sweet Concessions, serves gooey cookie bars, chocolate brownies, gourmet coffees, foccacia and other delicacies at seven theaters throughout Manhattan. Rose orders food two or three times a week to preserve freshness and minimize waste. She has stopped baking the confections herself.

Her staff now consists of four full-time and about 20 part-time employees. Counter staff are paid between $5 and $8 an hour for each five-hour shift; managers get up to $20 an hour. Employees set up, sell and then put away and clean the concession at the end of the evening. Rose pays theaters from 10 to 30 percent of her gross sales, but smaller theaters often consider the stand a service and won’t take a cut at all. Her only other expenses are food costs and promotional materials, such as table cards, leaving her with net profits above 10 percent.

Rose says that upscale concession stands can work in other venues: bookstores, office buildings, retail stores, roller rinks, movie theaters. To get started, says Rose, “Go visit and see what they’re doing now. Talk to em. ployees. Count the number of customers. learn everything you can.” Then, she continues, find out who is in charge of concessions and call that person. Say, ‘I can do better.’ Just be really aggressive.” Rose ought to know: Her sales last year topped $500,000.

In case Rudy wasn’t persuasive enough, we’ve discovered another reason to get to the box office: the playful intermission cocktail menu at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Instead of the usual no-name-booze-in-a-plastic-cup to accompany the Raisinets, there’s an inspired (if jokey). selection of theater tie-ins that evoke a less sober theatergoing age. Contact’s An Italian Housewife combines brandy, sweet vermouth, and a dash of bitters. The Tryst at Vespers, offered during performances of Barbara Cook’s Mostly Sondheim, is a high-octane blend of cognac, Cointreau, créme de cassis, and champagne. The recently departed QED, or apple-vodka martini, makes a return engagement next month, along with Alan Alda in the hit play’s starring role. Sweet Concessions, the bar’s operator, began developing specialty cocktails about a year ago, “when everyone was watching Sex and the City,” says manager Brett Stasiewicz. To capitalize on the Candace Bushnell-induced Cosmo craze — and to boost sales — he started mixing seasonal champagne cocktails arid winter warmers like the Misty-Eyed Irishman (heavy on the Irish whiskey), all of which can be ordered before the curtain and collected at intermission, an incredibly civilized alternative to jockeying for position in line. Popular in London, advance ordering hasn’t caught on here. “New Yorkers don’t like to pay for things in advance,” says Stasiewicz. Tele-charge Is bad enough.

Sweet Concessions, a food service company based out of Manhattan, has announced the opening of. its newest venture, a unique cafe/gift store located at 11 Village Plaza, South Orange. Sweet Concessions offers a wide variety of clever gift items, including versatile, custom-made gift baskets that will make creative shopping a matter of convenience for area residents. The cafe serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as a Sunday brunch and weekly rotating features, such as internationallyaccented “Curry of the Week.”

Inspired catering and event planning is provided to add innovative flair to any occasion.

A full take-out menu provides quick and delicious dining for the local resident, business person and for the fast-paced lifestyle of the New Jersey Transit commuter.

Sweet Concessions, 11 Village Plaza in South Orange, offers innovative comfort food in their cafe, complete with take-out service, creative gift wares, catering and event-planning options to help inspire a creative lifestyle.

Perfectly located just steps away from the South Orange train station, Sweet Concessions provides a unique dining, entertaining and shopping alternative for area residents and convenient service for commuters on the go.

It’s her first visit to Broadway and, aside from the zeal of New York audiences, Susannah Clapp feels completely at home

Sunday January 8, 2006

Spamalot Sam S Shubert Theatre
Doubt Walter Kerr Theatre
A Touch of the Poet Roundabout/Studio 54
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Circle in the Square
The Light in the Piazza Lincoln Centre Theatre at the Vivian Beaumont

More than eight years as The Observer’s theatre critic and I was still a Broadway virgin. But not any more. Just before Christmas, I finally went down the Great White Way. In New York, where drama critics often blog more words than they print, there’s an exhilarating appetite for plays. In the week I was there, when Manhattan got locked in by a transport strike, people walked 30 freezing blocks to see Gabriel Byrne perform in Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. At the curtain call, Byrne stepped up to thank them for making the trek, creating what for a Londoner was a weirdly cordial moment: when actors address audiences at home, it’s usually to rebuke them.

Yet how much does Broadway have to offer a Brit which is top-notch and which isn’t – well – British? Half the time, if it wasn’t for the zest of the audience, you wouldn’t know where you were. It’s hard to imagine a show more goonishly English than Spamalot – though the show won’t reach London till later this year. Next to it on West 44th Street, a National Theatre poster shows the bright faces of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, due shortly. Mamma Mia! is already a huge hit. David Hare’s Iraq War drama, Stuff Happens is transferring in the spring. The tide goes both ways. London will soon have Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked, which musicalises the untold stories of the witches of Oz, and the sex-and-puppets show Avenue Q. Nicholas Hytner looks set to bring the Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change to the National.

Let’s hope Britain also gets the cocktail firm (Sweet Concessions) which dreams up themed gargles in theatre bars. It has provided an array of whiskey variants for A Touch of the Poet and a sharp, sparkling, yellow concoction for A Light in the Piazza. Nothing, yet, for Spamalot, thank God (aka John Cleese).