San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tamale Lady dispensed love, advice
Virginia Ramos — whom several generations of San Franciscans know better as “the Tamale Lady” — has died. She was 65. The Office of the Medical Examiner confirmed her death.
Ramos was a street-food legend in San Francisco, and her death comes just as her longawaited restaurant in the Mission District was undergoing final repairs before opening.
According to interviews Ramos had given to The Chronicle over the years, she was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and emigrated to San Francisco
in 1980, where she settled with her seven children.
For decades, Ramos cooked hundreds of tamales in her kitchen and showed up at SoMa and Mission bars several nights a week, pulling a rolling insulated cooler from which she would dispense tamales to drunk and sober customers alike. Over time, her patrons would come to know her for not only tamales, but also her unsolicited life advice and philosophical banter — “I don’t know you, but I love you,” was a frequent musing of hers.
Some nights her route would bring her to more than a dozen bars, but Zeitgeist was most closely associated with her appearances. It regularly held birthday parties for Ramos and posted a semipermanent “Tamale Lady” sign.
On the occasion of her 50th anniversary, local bands composed 30second songs in her honor, and Cecil B. Feeder compiled them in a documentary about Ramos, “Our Lady of Tamale.”
She told The Chronicle in 2011 that she was able to put five of her seven children through college by cleaning houses and making tamales. “I like to feed people and talk to the youngsters I see in bars who are broken by drugs,” she said then. “I am like a mother to them, telling them over and over to take better care of themselves.” She greeted them with “Hey, honey” and said goodbye with a hug.
In 2013, the San Francisco Environmental Health Department informed bars where she made the most frequent appearances that it would hold them liable for allowing an illegal food vendor to sell food in their businesses.
She stopped selling tamales at that time. Instead, she raised $20,000 through an IndieGogo campaign and partnered with the Mission Housing Development Corporation to build out a space on 16th Street and Capp Street.
The project was almost complete, confirmed kitchen architect David Orozco, but the building required softstory structural retrofitting, which delayed it even further.
“Everything has taken a long time,” Ramos told The Chronicle in January 2018. “But I’m happy.”
Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @jonkauffman