Good Times Roll

home of Orchid Café, chef and pitmaster Jose Perez looked around, taking in the moment. Perez, who is now in his early 40s, grew up in Fair Haven in the 1980s and 90s. As a kid on Fillmore Street, the Grand Avenue branch location became his second home. Tuesday was like coming full-circle.

“Growing up in Fair Haven, we didn’t have money for books,” he said. He remembered checking out a book he’d first seen on the show “Reading Rainbow” about whale watching, and holding on to it because he loved it so much. He never got in trouble with the library. Three decades and a move to Morris Cove later, he still visits the branch—now as a dad, with three kids who love books as much as he does.

Perez joined Bear’s Smokehouse five years ago, after hearing they were looking for a pitmaster. In advance of Mardi Gras, he started building a recipe that would pay homage to New Orleans’ kaleidoscopic culinary culture, and to his own Puerto Rican upbringing. After starting with the “holy trinity” of onions, celery, and peppers, he seasoned and cooked the sausage beneath the smokehouse’s brisket, so it would collect the drippings for flavor.

“It feels like Night at the Museum,” he said with a big, broad smile. “I love seeing people here.”

On the dance floor, Maia was closing out the night with “New York New York.” There with Newhallville neighborhood champion Jeanette Sykes, Jennifer Tillman raised her arms above her head, burst into a huge smile, and slid back onto the dance floor for one more time before the end of the night. A former psychiatric social worker, Tillman praised the library as “a place of fellowship,” where patrons could find so much more than books.

Growing up in New Haven, Tillman has always loved the library, she said. As a mom, she spent time there with her kids, and now brings her grandkids. When she decided to pursue her real estate license a few years ago, the Mitchell Branch Library became her one-stop-shop for resources and study materials.

It echoed Morand’s reminder from much earlier in the evening, that the library is no single thing to any one person. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, he remembered visiting each of the library’s five branches. At the Courtland Seymour Wilson Branch in the Hill, he arrived to see a line already outside the door, waiting for the library to open.

For him, that was a testament enough to the role that it plays every day.

As people trickled out of Ives and burst back into the damp night, the library fell quiet once again, ready for another day.