Business Ideas

By MELANIE GRAYCE WEST

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Ray Darmstady pours at City Swiggers at 320 E. 86th St.

Wine has long enjoyed the spotlight in New York, with specialty shops and restaurants designed for choosy oenophiles. Now, a traditionally more humble beverage has begun to get similar attention.

Over the past year, a host of shops have emerged catering to “beeroisseurs”—devotees who can debate hops content with the fervor of a political contest and spend hours tracking down an obscure Trappist ale.

To be sure, there have been stores and bars throughout the five boroughs for years that offer rare and sometimes very expensive brews.

But this new breed of beer shop more closely follows the model of a boutique retailer, where beer buffs can often sample before buying and drink a pint at the bar with paired bites. Customers can take home a mixed six-pack and fill a growler—a refillable jug container—straight from the tap. Some stores even host book-signings and lectures.

Unlike the corner bodega, the shops offer enormous selections of craft or specialty beers—small production beers from around the world made from premium ingredients—that can range in price from roughly $1.25 for a single bottle to $25 for a 750-milliliter bottle (about 25 ounces), and up.

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

A sampling of the beer selection at City Swiggers in Manhattan.

At the new City Swiggers on the Upper East Side, customers can plunk down $41.99 for Drie Fonteinen Oude Kriek, a sour cherry Belgian beer aged in oak. Or for $25.89, they can take home Nebraska Brewing Co.’s Apricot au Poivre Saison beer brewed with, of course, apricots and pepper.

The rise of specialty beer shops is reflected in growing numbers of state-issued tavern wine licenses, which allow holders to serve wine and beer—but not hard liquor—and to sell beer to-go. Since 2005, the number of tavern wine licenses issued in the city has nearly doubled, to 157 from 82, according to data from the New York State Liquor Authority.

The marketplace for beer in New York is now at a “tipping point,” said Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and editor of “The Oxford Companion to Beer.”

“What’s really happening is that craft beer is not a trend or a fad,” according to Mr. Oliver. “It’s a return to normality.”

Historically, it’s abnormal to “have three [kinds of] beers for 300 million people,” Mr. Oliver said. Now, “people are looking at beer for what it is: which is food.”

But at the same time, those getting into the specialist beer business have a much higher threshold to succeed because the average New York bar now has a pretty wide selection of specialty brews, Mr. Oliver said.

To be unique, he said, a store now has to stock “sufficiently obscure” beers.

“Everybody’s got great beer now,” Mr. Oliver said, but “there’s an arms race on the geeky end of things.”

Major grocery stores and first-time business owners alike are now opening up shops to cater to beer devotees.

In November, the Whole Foods Market at Columbus Circle opened a tavern-like space within its store, replacing what had at one time been a wine shop and later an area for personal-hygiene products.

It’s a first-of-its-kind tap room and café for the Northeast region, with 10 beers and eight wines on tap and another 150 bottled beers. The location was the “perfect space,” said Michael Sinatra, a spokesman for Whole Foods Markets in the Northeast region, for capturing “the enthusiasm that’s out there among shoppers in trying different beers and trying local beers.”

This month, Ted Kenny, a former Wall Street trader, will open Top Hops on the Lower East Side. The store and tasting room will sell some 700 to 800 beers in bottles and offer 20 beers on tap, with a stock evenly split between domestic and imported brews.

Mr. Kenny, 42 years old, has worked in the beer industry and began his plans for a specialty beer store a few years ago. Seeing others successfully get into the retail business encouraged him to open Top Hops with his cousin and business partner, Bryan Weadock, co-head of global fixed-income commodities for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“I wanted to do a place that really celebrates beer,” said Mr. Kenny, who is planning to make education and proper pouring a cornerstone of his store. “I feel very fortunate that I’ve found a way to hopefully make a living at something that I’m very passionate about.”

Also new to the beer shop industry are Alan and Pamela Rice, who spent three years brewing up the idea for City Swiggers, their two-month-old shop and tasting room.

So far, the neighborhood response has been “overwhelming,” Ms. Rice said. “We’re trying our best to keep up.”

Mr. Rice, 48, previously worked in the financial-services industry, and City Swiggers is his first retail store. Beer has long been his passion and he’d been active in the city’s beer community as president of Brooklyn’s Malted Barley Appreciation Society.

City Swiggers carries some 500 beers hand-picked by Mr. Rice. The couple designed the store to be approachable to people just learning about beer and those coming in with strollers. Still, Mr. Rice said, a fair number of customers are serious connoisseurs willing to travel for something unusual. He said beer blogs and online forums have fueled the local “craze” for exotic beers.

“I hope this isn’t just a fad and that this is a true trend,” he said.

Beachfront homes $6 million and under, in Dana Point, Calif., Osterville, Mass., and Loveladies, N.J. Juliet Chung has details on The News Hub.

DANA POINT, Calif. $5 Million

A 4,000-square-foot home, with four bedrooms and five bathrooms, on a 0.2-acre lot

DETAILS: This two-story, Cape Cod-style home has a master suite that runs the length of the house and has a double-sided fireplace and a terrace. The property also has a fire pit, outdoor fireplace, lawn and patio. 2011 property taxes are about $88,700.

BY THE SEA: The beach is sandy and is near Dana Point Harbor.

HANG TEN: Stewart Surfboards, six miles away in San Clemente, offers handmade custom surfboards and also rents out boards.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Chance of rain, high 67 degrees.

SOURCE: Doug Echelberger, Echelberger Group, 949-498-7711, doug@echelberger.com; Realtor.com

OSTERVILLE, Mass. $5.5 Million

A 3,400-square-foot home with seven bedrooms and four bathrooms, on 2.2 acres in Cape Cod

DETAILS: This beachfront Colonial was built in 1935 and renovated over the years. The L-shaped property fronts a saltwater pond and also has a tennis court. It’s about a mile away from the center of the village. 2011 property taxes are nearly $46,000.

BY THE SEA: The private beach fronts Nantucket Sound. The area is popular for biking and walking.

HANG TEN: Boarding House Surf Shop is eight miles away in Hyannis.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Windy, high 52 degrees.

SOURCE: Jack Cotton, Sotheby’s International Realty, 508-957-5500, jack@jackcotton.com; Realtor.com

LOVELADIES, N.J. $6 Million

A 4,300-square-foot home with five bedrooms and five bathrooms, on 0.7-acre on Long Beach Island

DETAILS: The home has a double-height family room, an elevator, plus a screened porch and several ipe decks. There’s also a pool. The home is being sold furnished; 2011 property taxes are $34,000.

BY THE SEA: The property has 125 feet of beach frontage. Grassy dunes lead to a sandy beach.

HANG TEN: Ron Jon Surf Shop, seven miles away in Ship Bottom, offers surfboards and apparel.

FRIDAY’S FORECAST: Clear, high 52 degrees.

SOURCE: Benée Scola, Benée Scola & Company, 609-494-0077,

benee@beneescola.com.

—
Juliet Chung

New York

In England Terence Rattigan is a growth stock, a purveyor of immaculately crafted plays who was immensely popular in the 1940s and ’50s, went out of fashion in the ’60s and is now popular once more. Not so in America, where the once-beloved author of “The Browning Version” and “The Winslow Boy” remains largely unknown to under-50 theatergoers. It’s been at least a decade since a Rattigan play received a high- or medium-profile professional production anywhere in this country, and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of “Man and Boy,” written in 1963, marks the first time that any of his plays has been seen on Broadway since 1998. This being the centenary of Rattigan’s birth, it makes sense that the Roundabout has revived one of his plays as a vehicle for Frank Langella, and it’s no surprise whatsoever that Mr. Langella, one of our greatest stage actors, makes the most of the opportunity. The surprise is that “Man and Boy,” which flopped hard in 1963 and sank without trace, turns out to be a tautly effective melodrama whose subject—the villainy of a financial “wizard” who is unmasked as a big-time swindler—is as timely as tomorrow’s tweets.

Mr. Langella plays Gregor Antonescu, a suavely rapacious monster from Romania who believes that “love is a commodity I can’t afford” and made his money the old-fashioned way, by stealing it. Faced with imminent exposure and ruin, he holes up in the New York apartment of his son (Adam Driver), a cocktail piano player who fled to America and changed his name from Vassily to Basil in order to escape his father’s influence. A good idea, too, since Gregor tries to get himself off the hook by passing off the unwitting boy as gay in an attempt to soften up the deeply closeted executive (Zach Grenier) who is threatening to blow the whistle on the father’s multimillion-dollar defalcations. To say anything more would be to give the game away, but you can rest assured that Rattigan, whose mastery of theatrical convention was complete, makes all the plot-related trains run precisely on time.

Mr. Langella, who was so fabulous in “Frost/Nixon,” is a crook of a different color in “Man and Boy,” courtly and exquisitely well mannered, a man whose whole life has been an act and who is determined to keep it up all the way to the final curtain. Yes, his performance is stagey, but deliberately so, and by playing the first half of “Man and Boy” in the silken tones of high comedy, he sets the audience up for the crash that everyone knows is just around the corner.

The trouble with actors like Mr. Langella is that they have a way of washing their colleagues off the stage, and that’s what happens here. Mr. Driver and Virginia Kull, who plays his flapperish girlfriend, seem all but weightless by comparison. It doesn’t help that Maria Aitken, the director, seems to have nudged her cast in the direction of broad-brush caricature. Mr. Langella is supposed to be stagey—that’s the point—but his regal carriage would make better theatrical sense were it framed by more conventionally realistic supporting performances. Nor is Ms. Aitken’s staging sure in tone: We laugh so much at the first act that it takes all of Mr. Langella’s formidable powers to change the key of the play to the fathomless darkness of the last scene.

I also had problems with Derek McLane’s set, which purports to be a grubby two-room Greenwich Village basement flat circa 1934 but is so big that you could mount the first act of “Aida” there and have enough room left over to do “The Fantasticks” in the corner. For all its gingerbready charm, the American Airlines Theatre (unlike London’s 482-seat Duchess Theatre, where Ms. Aitken directed “Man and Boy” six years ago) simply doesn’t lend itself to the kind of concentrated intimacy needed to do justice to a small-cast, single-set play. While Mr. Langella overcomes this built-in difficulty with ease, his fellow actors, Mr. Driver in particular, seem less comfortable filling their space.

Ms. Aitken, on the other hand, deserves much credit for her skillful editing of Rattigan’s original script, which she has cut by about 20 minutes. Rattigan favored conciseness but failed to achieve it in “Man and Boy,” and by tightening up the show to suit modern-day tastes, Ms. Aitken has done him a service. I also liked John Gromada’s period-flavored incidental music, though the program really should have given credit to Bix Beiderbecke, whose little-known “In the Dark” Mr. Gromada has used to nicely wistful effect.

Rattigan wrote stronger plays than “Man and Boy,” “The Deep Blue Sea” and “Separate Tables” in particular, and he would have been even better served had the Roundabout revived one of them instead. Nor does this production, save for Mr. Langella’s ennobling presence and Ms. Aitken’s shrewd cuts, make the best possible case for “Man and Boy.” But it’s still what the Brits call a rattling good show. If you don’t know how able a playwright Terence Rattigan was, you can now find out what you’ve been missing.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

“Task” lights have narrow job descriptions. They point, like pointers: goose-necked, spring-loaded, metal-headed. Wouldn’t you rather have a desk lamp? Hooped in a ring of warm light, shaded and soft, yet bright enough to read by, it can be a light fixture that’s part of the life of the room, and not just the desk.

Desk lamps don’t have much of a résumé: They were candles and then they became electrical lights. The downward shade was the big innovation at the turn of the 19th century, and Tiffany took full, beautiful advantage of that. But since the 1920s, and the modern movement, desk lamps have been largely judged by their agility: the ability to pivot, swivel and bend over backward.

True desk lamps have a greater sense of purpose. They can work effectively in a home office but also migrate freely. Try one on a narrow console table in an entry hallway, with a chair next to it: a place to read the mail in the morning, or, if left on, a beacon that welcomes you home to harbor when you return in the evening.

—William L. Hamilton

Grotto

Decoupage

John Derian’s Grotto, with its 19th-century black-and-white shell pattern, has the feel of a flea-market find. The shade is black silk string; height is 22 inches. $1,265 ($975 without shade), johnderian.com

Reneé desk lamp

Austrian Influence

Michael Graves’s silver-plated Reneé desk lamp was inspired by a 1907 Josef Hoffmann design. The lamp has a silk shade with piping, and measures 16 inches high. $1,200, neuegalerie.org

Bouilotte lamp

Empire-Style

Play the Bouillotte’s ornate gold-plated brass candlesticks against type, on a modern desk. The lamp is 29 inches high; the tole-steel shade is 15¼ inches in diameter. $5,450, peguerin.com

Sempé lamp

Modern

Taking its “task” with a slight tilt of the hat, the Swedish Sempé lamp, designed by Inga Sempé for Wästberg, clamps to the desk. A version with a weighted base is also available. wastberg.com

By ERICA ALINI

The scramble for faculty jobs is prompting graduate students and newly minted Ph.D.s to look overseas.

While hiring freezes and budgets cuts pervade U.S. higher education, universities in Asia and the Middle East are hungry for candidates, often amid a dearth of native applicants. Although most advertise their faculty openings all over the world, the schools see U.S. doctorates as prestigious and useful in recruiting students as they build their reputations.

Last year, Frederick “Fritz” Monsma, who earned his doctorate in philosophy from Boston College in 2003, applied for one position in humanities after another — only to learn that U.S. universities were canceling their searches. He eventually got an offer from American University in Iraq-Sulaimani, a private school in the country’s Kurdistan region that opened in 2007. “I stopped looking elsewhere,” says. Mr. Monsma. “I knew it was going to be an adventure, both in life and pedagogy.”

The Iraqi university says it received between 400 and 500 applications, mostly from the U.S., this year alone, more than double the 150-200 it had last year.

Cuts in government funding and shrinking endowments are taking a toll on many U.S. universities. To cope, some have frozen hiring and increased teaching loads, prompting teaching candidates to look overseas for work.

Even in good times, many new Ph.D.s, especially in the humanities and social sciences, struggle to land a promising university position right out of school. Ph.D. recipients often cobble together fellowships, temporary positions or postdoctoral programs; the lucky land a job that might lead to tenure, which guarantees employment and academic freedom.

“The supply-demand ratio is a bit out of whack” in the academic job market in general,” says Jack Schuster, a professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University in California and an expert on the academic labor market. In this kind of economy, he adds, “things are very, very tough.”

Mr. Monsma, for example, was juggling three jobs for a year before landing a full-time position at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M, in 2005. On the hunt for new opportunities, he applied for the job at American University in Iraq-Sulaimani. Mr. Monsma, whose dissertation focused on the relationship between philosophy and science, will be teaching math and science classes there. It isn’t a tenure-track position but his contract can be renewed.

Hiring in English and foreign-language departments fell more than 20% this year at U.S. universities compared with a year ago, according to the Modern Language Association. Similarly, job postings of the American Political Science Association were down by 14% from 2007-08, and many universities didn’t fill positions they initially advertised due to budget constraints.

Many of the job openings advertised for universities outside the U.S. are for coveted tenure-track positions. In recent years, foreign governments, especially in the Middle East and East Asia, have been competing to lure U.S. scholars and universities in an attempt to improve higher education at home. In Qatar, for example, the government paid for an entire Education City, a futuristic, 2,500-acre mega-campus hosting six full-fledge sister campuses linked to universities in the U.S., including Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon Universities.

The recession also deepened the applicant talent pool for overseas universities.

The School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins said its program in Nanjing, China, received an unusual number of inquiries from young professors in the U.S. this year. Even though the school had filled positions for the 2009-10 academic year in October, “emails kept coming in from folks giving me the sorry story of the job market and salary cuts,” said the school’s faculty recruiter, Carolyn Townsley.

Teaching abroad carries some risks. The jobs typically offer fewer opportunities to network with highly regarded U.S.-based scholars, and they are sometimes seen as lower-status by U.S. universities, a perception that could harm academics’ prospects when they seek to return to the U.S.

“From the U.S. vantage point,” says John Curtis of the American Association of University Professors, “there is that element of difference, newness and uncertainty about how universities operate abroad.”

Jocelyn Mitchell Sage, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics at Georgetown University, hopes that the experience teaching and researching overseas will balance out any professional drawbacks. This year, she accepted a post as a teaching assistant at Georgetown’s sister campus in Qatar next year. Ms. Mitchell, who moved to Qatar with her husband, said that while she had to adjust to the different culture, she felt comfortable living in a Muslim country, noting that foreign women aren’t required to wear a veil in Qatar.

Ms. Mitchell says she feels so at home she plans to look for work in the region once her Georgetown contract ends.

Write to Erica Alini at Erica.Alini@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11