It’s 1 p.m. on a Tuesday at Pascal’s on Ponce, and every chair in the 55-seat Coral Gables restaurant—plus the bar—is taken.

Patrons glance up as they recognize a familiar face: former Coral Gables Mayor Don Slesnick pops in to greet two of the city’s most prominent lawyers, Joseph Serota, a co-founder of Weiss Serota Helfman Pastoriza Cole & Boniske, and Matthew Mandel, the firm’s head of litigation and president of the Broward County chapter of the Federal Bar Association.