A Bloomingdale Bar Honors Betty White With a New ‘Golden Girls’ Cocktail Menu

Etabli’s general manager Dylan DelliSanti celebrates his sentimental connection to The Golden Girls with a new clump of cocktails devoted to its sassy female cast, including the late, great Betty White.

Starting this week, DelliSanti memorializes the ‘80s sitcom about four older, single ladies living in Miami with a “Thank You for Being a Friend” menu at the Bloomingdale bar (84 T Street NW). Growing up in Virginia Beach, he remembers watching the cult classic on repeat at his grandma’s house.

“The summer before sixth grade, I saw every episode at least three times,” he says. “Betty’s passing sparked the [menu] idea.”

Each cast member — Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia — gets their own on-brand cocktail ($14) for the next few months. White’s “St. Olaf” daiquiri, named after the small Minnesota farming town where her Rose character is from, stars aquavit made in her home state. To mark what would have been her 100th birthday over the weekend, a nationwide “Betty White Challenge” helped animal welfare nonprofits raise money. At Etabli, buy the avid animal lover’s honorary cocktail and $1 will be donated to the Humane Rescue Alliance through January.

Meanwhile, Blanche’s man-hungry character inspires a South Beach spin on a Sex and the Beach (vodka, peach schnapps, grenadine, and rosemary), topped with a colorful umbrella. NYC-born Dorothy has a Manhattan-style bourbon coupe called “Shady Pines, Ma!” with a Maraschino cherry garnish. For Sophia, a quick-witted Sicilian immigrant and Dorothy’s mom, there’s a Negroni-like “Sicily, 1922” featuring Italian spirits (a wine-based Cappelletti aperitif, gin, dry vermouth) and Marseille amaro from Brooklyn.

A fifth “Cheesecake in the Kitchen” dessert drink, made with coconut cream rum and a graham cracker rim, unites all four snowbirds on the show set in Florida.

“It kind of tastes like a key lime pie,” he says.

A favorite Florida pastime is also an unofficial part of the new program.

“If I’m working at the bar after 9 and someone orders one of their drinks, I’ll happily do my best rendition of a tarot card reading,” says DelliSanti, who bought a themed Golden Girls deck to promote Etabli’s new cocktail menu.

The wood-fired replacement to Tyber Creek, open daily at 5 p.m., also runs a popular monthly wine club with selections handpicked by owners Kathleen Davis and Thomas Boisvert.

• Fans raise thousands of dollars for animal shelters as part of the Betty White Challenge [The Week]