The Charlottesville 29

Susan Carla Jackiewicz (August 29, 1966 – December 14, 2023)

In a special edition for Valentine’s Day, this week’s Five Finds on Friday celebrates one of Charlottesville’s great love stories.

There is one thing all love stories share. They end.

Some say that the inevitability of their ending is what gives love stories meaning. “Knowing that this can’t go on forever,” sings Jason Isbell, is why lovers hold hands and make plans, in their finite time on Earth. If “death was a joke,” he says, we wouldn’t feel the need.

Here in Charlottesville, the love story of Justin Ide and Susan Jackiewicz inspired the community for more than a decade. They held hands and made plans. But, their time together was unexpectedly cut short in December.

Justin is a photographer whose photos have appeared on this site, as well as much more distinguished publications. Susan was a health care professional, “bonus mom” and caretaker of family, friends, and Labradors. She was the love of Justin’s life, and their shared food experiences were a big part of their union. Susan fell for Justin on their first date, she said, because he made “Brie en Croûte with Pistachios” for her.

Susan especially loved the Charlottesville food community, and in this week’s Five Finds on Friday, Ide shares some of her favorites. Also near to her heart was Local Food Hub. If you are inclined, remember Susan with a donation in her name.

1) Baguettes from Albemarle Baking Company. “The importance of bread in our life together is right up there with oxygen and dogs, and the baguettes from Gerry Newman at ABC were essential elements of our Friday night ‘dinners.’ Often, not just on Fridays, we would stop at Feast!, pick up cheese, salami, pate and some Crose from King Family Vineyards, and have a simple ‘country picnic’ in the living room, or make the trip to King Family here in Crozet.”

2) Cheeseburger at Jack Brown’s. “In March 2023, Susan, a lover of cooking shows and competitions, decided we needed to have our own Charlottesville competition, and she chose the cheeseburger. In the past we’ve done ‘tour de baguette’ while we were in France, ‘tour de Gelato’ in Italy, and even a ‘tour de cannoli’ when we lived in Boston, but here it was with the cheeseburger. Before Susan passed, we ate fourteen different burgers and judged them on ten different categories. We each ate the same exact burger combo each time, to be fair. Although we didn’t manage to get to every place on our list, Jack Brown’s was by far the best burger we had in town, and sitting there at the bar will be a great memory for me.”

3) Lobster Roll at the bar at Public Fish & Oyster. “We are New Englanders through and through, and when we found out that Public had lobster rolls at the bar during happy hour, we were sold. With John, another New Englander, behind the bar, and always ready with a Kir Royale for Susan, we were happy campers. Just don’t try and convince us there is any other way to eat a lobster roll other than the way they do in Maine.”

4) Polpettine Al Forno at Lampo. “It goes without saying that Lampo is one of the best places in town for just about anything they have on the menu. But the combination of beef and pork meatballs is out of this world. You get six meatballs per order, but one order was never enough for the two of us, and we would often order an extra one to-go, because they were that good.”

5) Farm to Batteau with James River Batteau and Two Fire Table. “This is the outlier on the list because not many people have experienced this yet, but 2024 is going to be the year that this experience blows up, I assure you. Last October, just two months before Susan passed, we had the good fortune to spend an evening on the James River and eat the delicious food prepared by Sarah Rennie of Two Fire Table. Cooked over an open fire, as you float on a Batteau, the locally sourced sausages and fish were amazing, and the atmosphere as the sun set put the experience over the top.”