For good food, good company, good service, forget the dining room and Belly Up to the Bar

If she's eating by herself, sitting at the bar makes her feel less alone than sitting by herself at a table. And if she's on a first date, she always knows she can chat with the bartender if her companion goes quiet.

As a bartender at the eclectic South Tampa eatery Pane Rustica, Strickland knows firsthand that customers who eat lunch and dinner at her bar instead of in the adjacent dining room do so because they're served by someone who knows them and what they enjoy.

"We have a ton of regulars," she says. "They call me on the bar phone and say, 'I'm coming in.' I know immediately what they want to eat and drink, so I'll put the order in before they get here."

Restaurants in the Tampa Bay area and nationwide are finding that catering to customers with dinner in the bar can lead to bigger profits and a more intimate relationship with their patrons.

Richard Zingale, architect for the Tampa firm Urban Studio, which specializes in designing for hospitality businesses, says restaurants are being as flexible as possible with bar space. The days of using the bar only as a stopover for a table or just to serve alcohol are long gone.

Zingale says that about three years ago, design clients started asking for a larger percentage of their restaurants to be dedicated to bar space, including booths and surrounding tables. The trend started in New York and Los Angeles, he says, where restaurateurs discovered they could cycle customers in and out more efficiently in the bar than they could at traditional table settings.

Zingale tries to design bars with curves or angles to encourage interaction between customers. A U-shaped bar like that at Ocean Prime at International Plaza is a good example of a space that invites customers to talk to each other as well as with bar staff, he says.

"Since the bar generates the most revenue in the restaurant, getting the most out of that space is critical," Zingale says.

Pane Rustica's owners Kevin and Karyn Kruszewski expanded the restaurant in July with a 2,800-square-foot bar and meeting room extension after obtaining a license last year to serve alcohol. They knew that if they didn't do it, a competitor likely would. Plus, their landlord agreed to help with costs.

Kevin Kruszewski said they wanted an oval-shaped bar counter so customers could socialize and people-watch. There are about 20 seats at the oval, black marble-topped bar and another two dozen in booths and at tables around it.

Kruszewski didn't want the bar area to become "a total pickup space" but to give customers a place to feel more emotionally connected to the business. He created a special "boutique-y" bar menu, but customers have gravitated to the full lunch and dinner menus. They wanted the same food, just in a different setting. Bar customers often enter through a bar doorway instead of the main restaurant entrance.

"Sometimes they don't want to go out and take a table and do the whole spiel from start to finish," he says. "Eating at the bar is a more casual event and tends to be a little more intimate and convenient."

"It's all very interpersonally oriented," Kruszewski says. I have so many people who come back just for Sebrenna. During the holidays, she had to haul away gifts from regulars in a wheelbarrow."

The granddaddy of Tampa Bay bar dining can be found at Bern's Steak House, where Marco Neri has been the manager at the gothic-decorated bar for six of his 28 years as a bartender.