Dips

Featured in various episodes.

Only Murders in the Building, 2021.

There are many great mysteries at the center of Only Murders in the Building Who killed Tim Kono? Who’s the Arconia’s true villain? Why does Sting have a dog? But perhaps the most unspoken enigma of them all is this: how is Oliver Putnam still alive, and not just a salt-cured pile of charisma held together by cracker crumbs and duck fat?

Oliver, played by Martin Short in what can only be described as a masterclass of theater-kid-in-decline energy, is a man who lives on dips. He does not eat dips so much as he believes in them, lives through them. To Oliver, dips are not a side. Dips are not an appetizer. Dips are a lifestyle, a doctrine, a way of arranging your life around the blessed trinity of creaminess, tang, and spreadability. Dips are a “Big Meal.”

The man makes tzatziki look like a personality trait.

He offers dips the way others offer condolences or libations. Someone dies? Let’s get the baba ghanoush out. Someone gets arrested? Time for tapenade. Someone uncovers a decades-old secret involving secret passageways, missing jewels, and Steve Martin in a turtleneck? You know there’s going to be a layered fiesta dip involved. Ideally with scallions. “It’s not a meal, it’s a mood,” he’d say, before dunking a brittle pita chip into a ramekin of something vaguely cheesy and medically suspect.

There’s something theatrical in the way Oliver treats his dips. He’s not just consuming. He’s casting. That red pepper hummus isn’t a condiment—it’s the ingenue. The spinach artichoke is an aging chorus girl with a heart of gold and a heavy dairy base. Even the chips get blocking.

In one episode, he declares, with devastating sincerity, that he often replaces entire meals with dips. This is said not with shame or a doctor’s note in hand, but with pride. As if meals themselves are bourgeois, rigid relics of a less imaginative era. As if dinner, with its suffocating three-course tyranny, is an affront to culinary jazz.

And you know what? He’s not wrong.

Because in a world that’s constantly asking you to sit down and define yourself in neat little categories, murderer, podcaster, neighbor, suspect, maybe Oliver’s approach is the only sane response: scoop up a little of everything, put it on a cracker, and enjoy the mess.

Sure, you might not solve the mystery. But at least you’ll have a well-curated crudité tray. And isn’t that, in its own way, a kind of justice?

Make it! Best Dip Recipes from NYT Cooking.