Best Bartender in Palm Beach

When new customers start to become regulars, Candy Mansfield has an unabashed way of remembering their names. She'll scrawl them on cocktail napkins, complete with short descriptions of what they drink and how they spend time in the bar. "You're Jerry's wife, right?" she asked a blond patron recently while referencing one of her napkin notes. "He drinks Sam Adams and plays pinball." Mansfield says she does it not because bartending at the rough-around-the-edges Coasters is her business but because it's her social life. "This is my Friday and Saturday night out. This is where I party," she says. The chronically friendly 52-year-old Mansfield grew up with bartending in the blood; her parents owned a bar in Illinois. She worked as a court clerk before taking the job pouring pitchers at Coasters three years ago. Her tips are helping to put a daughter through medical school, something that endears her to the Palm Beach Atlantic University kids who frequent Coasters. Aside from the cocktail napkin trick, Mansfield does something else pretty damned nice for regulars. If they request bottled beer enough, she'll order a keg of it. Now that's service.