When Beneranda Razatos sat down to order breakfast at the Plaza Café after attending Mass on Sunday mornings, she drove everyone nuts.
Flamboyant, warm, welcoming and forever ready with a joke, the longtime Santa Fean would always ask for the Bene Special.
Bene was her nickname, and the downtown Plaza Café had no such special dish for her.
She would still get what she ordered. After all, she ran the place with her husband, Dan Razatos, for decades. And everyone loved her, said her friend Rosalina Grace.
Bene Razatos died of natural causes July 15 in her Tesuque home, surrounded by loved ones, her son Andrew Razatos said. She was 87.
“I can still hear her laughing,” Grace said in an interview Tuesday at the Plaza Café. “She was always telling jokes in English and in Spanish.”
Andrew Ratazos, who called his mother the matriarch of the restaurant, said “her hobby was charity, making sure other people were happy.”
Born in 1934 in the small New Mexico railroad town of Duran, Bene Razatos had little opportunity to work or further her education following her graduation from high school in nearby Vaughn.
“Duran was not just a sleepy town but a poor town,” Andrew Razatos said. His mother’s father had shoveled coal for the railroad, he said, which did not pay well. The family lived in a one-room house in Duran and ate tortillas, beens and chile “all the time.”
Bene Razatos moved to Santa Fe in 1959 to work for the administration of Gov. John Burroughs in what was then known as the auditing and gas tax department. The mother of two children from a previous marriage, she also worked as a waitress at the long-gone La Conquistadora restaurant downtown.
A sometimes patron of the Plaza Café, she caught the eye of Dan Razatos, a Greek American who had purchased the restaurant in 1947. By then, it had been operating for more than 40 years.
Despite the 20-year difference in their ages, Bene said yes when Dan proposed marriage, and the two wed in 1961.
“I think it was love at first sight,” Andrew Razatos said.
In a 2013 interview with The New Mexican, Bene Razatos said, “Dan made sure that my two children from a previous relationship were treated equally as well as the four children we had together.”
Over time, she left her government job and began working at the Plaza Café as a bookkeeper, waitress, cashier and hostess.
“She was always the star of the party,” her son said.
A member of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Bene Razatos served as president of the altar society, sponsoring bake sales to raise funds for the church.
The baked goods had to be homemade, Grace recalled — “no buying cakes from Albertsons.”
After Mass on Sundays, Bene Razatos would invite friends, strangers and even priests to the cafe for breakfast. Grace was one of those people, and that’s how they became friends over 20 years ago.
Dan Razatos died in 1997. The Plaza Café and newer Plaza Café Southside, off Zafarano Drive, remain in the family’s hands.
In her later years, when she was no longer working in the restaurant, Bene Razatos would swing by the south-side cafe for a margarita and dinner to “keep abreast of my children and the work they’re doing,” she told The New Mexican.
The Plaza Café reminded her “of the best times of her life,” Andrew Razatos said.
A woman with a heart as big as the Plaza — as Grace put it — Bene Razatos put other people’s needs before her own, her friend said.
Still, one of Bene Razatos’ favorite toasts, when lifting her glass of cheer to others, was, “Here’s to us, but if we ever disagree, to hell with you and here’s to me,” her son said.
Looking around the restaurant that will no longer be filled with Bene Razatos’ energy, Grace said, “I miss her hugs.”
Her son said he would miss “her singing.”
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Matriarch of Plaza Café dies at 87 | Local News | santafenewmexican.com - Santa Fe New Mexican
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