Restaurants wish customers a happy, happy birthday

ORLANDO, Fla. (TMS) – Have you ever been to a restaurant when the whole serving staff trots out of the kitchen, puts on their happy, happy faces, claps and stomps and shouts, “Happy, happy, happy, birthday, birthday, birthday” to some poor soul?

Did you ever wonder why this strange birthday song turned into a cultural staple? Well, rest assured. There is really a reason behind the happy, happy, happy shtick.

The song, “Happy Birthday to You” still earns royalties – to the tune of $1 million a year.

Ba-da-bing.

Curiously, even though it is sung every minute of the day somewhere in the world, the songwriters, Mildred Hill, a Kentucky schoolteacher, and her sister, Patty Hill, an education professor at Columbia University, never earned much from the song.

Written by the Hill sisters in 1893, the song wasn’t copyrighted until 1935. In 1988, Warner Communications bought the rights to the song for $25 million – and the song earns about $1 million a year in royalties. The song is expected to enter the public domain when the copyright expires in 2010.

So inventive restaurants – eager to avoid the rights police like ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which polices the use of “Happy Birthday To You”) – have come up with alternative songs.

What they have created is a body of work like Red Lobster’s “Happy, Happy Birthday” song. It goes like this:

“Happy, happy birthday We’ re really glad you came Happy, happy birthday From the lobster gang We hope you had a good time On this your special day So have a happy birthday Hooray! Hoora! Hooray! Hey!”

New waiters are expected to learn the ditty, but Red Lobster manager Maggie Ashe said they pick up the song quickly.

“They’re a little shy at first, it doesn’t take long to pick up because it’s pretty simple,” said Ashe, who manages a Red Lobster in Leesburg, Fla. At Ashe’s restaurant, new waiters must learn more than one song so that the staff doesn’t have to sing – or chant – the song repeatedly on a high-volume birthday day.

Is there such a thing?

Absolutely, Ashe said.

“Some days you have only two or three people celebrating birthdays. Other days, it’s 15 to 20,” Ashe said. “Some days it seems like you’re singing happy birthday all the time. That’s when you want to have more than one song, to mix it up.”

Of course, some restaurants don’t care if they pay royalties. In fact, many already pay royalties for background music – or for the privilege of having a live entertainer.

At Outback Steakhouse, the idea behind the nonstandard birthday song is to illicit more than a yawn.

“I think ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is traditional and it’s not exciting,” said Rob Muellman, who manages 14 Outback Steakhouses in Central Florida. “Anybody can sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ at their home. People go out for a meal and a good time — and to be entertained.”

Italian restaurants seem to put their own spin on the birthday thing. Creative license, perhaps.

For instance, at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, birthday boys and girls are treated to a group of servers crowding round and singing “Tant’ Auguri a Te.” It helps to know a little Italian, obviously, to comprehend their meaning.

At Buca di Beppo, the tune remains the same, but the words are the Italian translation, said Alex Grimmond, whose official title – no kidding – is “paisano partner.”

Of course, not everyone remembers these memorable tunes. At Bergamo’s Italian Restaurant in Orlando, where professional waiter-singers croon to the diners, a waiter tried unsuccessfully to recite the words to the restaurant’s “‘house” birthday tune.

“We sing our own birthday song,” he said. “It goes like this. ‘Oh happy birthday, this is your special day, we’ve come to sing to you, just so you won’t get blue. Oh happy birthday, something, something ...’”

Of course, in Orlando – a town where residents are used to theme-park style entertainment – some restaurants are trying to stretch the birthday celebration beyond the clap-clap-clap, shout-shout-shout mode.

At Joe’s Crab Shack, a chain of seafood restaurants with a theme that one could describe as beach party meets beer bash, birthday celebrations have been kicked up a notch. The waiters have an entire repertoire of birthday bits – which include skits involving the birthday celebrant being dressed as a beauty queen or being fitted with a hula skirt.

“We have at least 12 different things that we do, including singing at the table,” said Michael West, an Orlando Joe’s manager. “We have three or four different songs. But it’s not your typical ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ It may be sung backwards or sung underwater or the short version.”

His answer only prompts more questions. How do you sing it underwater? And what could possibly be the short version of a song that only has four lines?

West, the seafood man, clammed up.

“It’s a secret. They’re all secrets,” he said. “I’ve given you way too much information already.”