(FORTUNE Magazine) – Wall Street seems to have lost track of TW Services Inc. That's understandable but a pity. The New York company shed Trans World Airlines in 1984 and became known as Transworld Corp. Last December, threatened with a takeover by Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman, it sold off the Hilton International hotel chain and rechristened itself TW Services Inc. When the genealogy gets that complicated, the analysts tend to lose interest. As a result, TW Services' recent price of $20 on the New York Stock Exchange may not reflect the promise the $3.4-billion-a-year company is showing in the fast-growing restaurant and food-catering businesses. Alan Snyder, head of Snyder Capital Management of San Francisco, says Wall Street hasn't caught on to TW's potential. ''I'm excited,'' he says. James J. Murren of New York's Cyrus J. Lawrence Inc., one of the few analysts who does follow the company, agrees with Snyder that earnings per share will go up from an estimated $1.20 this year to $1.60 in 1988. Both Snyder and Murren put the breakup value of TW Services at $31 or more. Perelman spotted hidden value last year when he bought 14.8% of Transworld Corp. and poised himself for a takeover. He made a temporary ''standstill'' pact, agreeing to no further moves on the company, but only on condition that it sell the hotel chain, which had an erratic earnings pattern. L. Edwin Smart, Transworld's chairman at the time, sold Hilton International to UAL Inc. for $835 million plus 2.5 million shares of UAL common stock. Proceeds of the sale were distributed directly to stockholders, including Perelman, whose share was $140 million. (UAL, since renamed Allegis, has just turned around and sold Hilton International.) The surviving TW Services consists of two major businesses. The Canteen division, with sales of $1.3 billion in 1986, provides catering and food vending machines to a whole range of institutions, from Yankee Stadium to Yellowstone National Park. Annual revenues of the Spartan division, which owns Hardee's, Quincy's, and Pryde's restaurants, will triple to $1.8 billion with the acquisition of the 1,200-restaurant Denny's chain. The Canteen division, says Murren, throws off $120 million in cash annually and is improving its profit margins in a business where small changes can make a big difference. In this year's second quarter the Canteen division raised its margin 0.7%, to 3.6%, lifting operating income by 37%. The Denny's acquisition, which went through just when Marriott seemed about to buy the chain, was a coup for TW Services' new chairman, Frank L. Salizzoni, 49. He paid $218 million in cash and assumed $625 million in debt, for a total of $843 million -- well under the book value of the company. Salizzoni, who rose on the financial side of Transworld, has succeeded in focusing the company's energies on growing food service businesses. This is all good news for Perelman, who is free to pounce again following the March expiration of the standstill agreement. He may not find that necessary, for Salizzoni is his kind of chairman: one who puts enhancing stock value first.