Snack Attack: Chips & Dips Opens a Literal Hole in the Wall in Andingmen

Snack Attack is your weekly guide to the sometimes smelly, sometimes flavorful, sometimes odd munchies to be had in the capital.


Andingmen has gotten a new snack time option in the form of Chips & Dips' first brick and mortar shop in Beijing, offering their eponymous chips and dips – as well as other offerings like wraps – to the masses.

Owned and operated by Serbian native and longtime Beijing expat Ivan Matic, Chips & Dips is actually the first overseas outing for his shop of the same name in Belgrade, which itself was born in 2020 when Matic found himself stuck in his home country due to Covid.

“I found myself in my hometown with nothing to do, so I started making sauces,” Matic tells me during a visit. “I eventually found a shop to rent near my house, set everything up, and it became very popular.”

With the overnight popularity of his Belgrade shop, Matic decided to take Chips & Dips with him when he returned to Beijing in late 2020. At first, he began selling his products at Rumble in the Jumble events, where he says his dips would sell out every time.

The idea to set up a brick and mortar shop happened only recently, when Matic was put in touch with nugget café co-owner Dave.

Operating from a window which opens on to the patio to the right of nugget, the Chips & Dips shop serves Matic’s original dips plus some new varieties, like a special Serbian style red pepper dip. There are also wraps, which Matic explains are named for all the women he has met or known while living in Beijing.

“Layla is my cousin, KC is the singer of our band, Chiara is a woman who would help me manage Chips & Dips, and Charlotte organizes Rumble in the Jumble.”

Ivan hopes that when live music gets the okay to go again, he’ll be able to join in for nugget’s events and tiny stage concerts, but for now, the shop is open everyday from 11am-9pm, where you can get wraps, dips and more to snack the day away in the hutongs.

Chips & Dips
8 Andingmen Garden Front Alley, Dongcheng District
东城区安定门花园前巷8号

READ: Snack Attack: Munching on a Pig-Eating Tiger, aka Gua Bao

Images courtesy of Chips & Dips

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Snack attack?!?! Well let me tell ya bruvvers, ya ain't lived till ya gobbled down a frypan full'o leeches and snapping turtle eggs.

Let me explain.

So mum slams in me backpack a pack uh Oscar Meier wieners, two cans of orangy soda, camping frypan and says supper is at 5, I'll whistle. So I sets out to the Big Crick, not the Near Crick, there to meet Micky and Geza.

Now, Micky and Geza were normally locked inside their corn crib of a Saturday morning, there to grind cow corn inta chicken feed, but they had found an escape hatch, and were in desperate need to meet with Mary Hairy Anne Rayce, who had sworn to meet us all and dance.

So I'm sittin at edge of the Big Crick, had a fire goin, and roastin a wiener. Waitin.

Suddenly, there is a burbling in the crick, and up from the slime and muck arisises none but Crazy Timmy.

`Timmy!, ya gots a new place to live! I cry exponentially.

`Indeed no' he rejoinds, `Im uh justa countin these snappin turtle eggs down in the muck here'.

He proffers overtly a handful of round golfballish leathery spheres.

Well, man, git yerself up here, we'll fry a coupla up.

He clambers agilely and cumbersomely up Crick bank, turtle eggs like ping pong balls, halo like, caressing, garlanding his noble curls. Heaves his leech covered carcass aside fire I had a burnin, mutterin, `I jus wish I could get these goldarnit bloodsuckers offa me'.

So I extracts from backpack shaker of salt. `Hold still' I says. Thus, sprinklin each leech, which I each beseeched forgiveness and indemnification, the bloodsuckers did fall from his body like early November leaves in a windstorm.

Scooped 'em all up, cracked a few snappin turtle eggs and fried 'em all up, bank of the Big Crick.

Now bellies filled, and the height of the noon sun causing slumber, - so rested we by the jubjub tree, and into a doze we fell.

Where were Geza, Micky, Fair Mary Hairy Anne-Rayce, Mike, Pastor Laffagut? Had they not gotten our text message? We slumbered on.

Soon, though, came wafting via the heat refracted, July sky sound bouncing stillness, unmistakingly the deep baritone of Mike Serpento, singing Volga Boatman. ( A mulit-ethnic tune be noted) He was slowly, surely, poling his Venitian skiff down the Big Crick, there us to meet, oblivous to the thinness of the water, which required frequent jumping out and pushing. They were a daring lot.

Timmy, finally roused by the approaching Mike, began tapping his throat to sound like bagpipes and comparing his frequency with that of Mike, necessarily finding meaningful consonances and dissonances.

Being towed behind Mike's Venetian skiff was the whole gawdang corn crib, Micky an Geza within ensconced. Still grindin up corn.

Fair Mary Hairy-Anne Rayce was starkers, covered in mud and performing artwork on her belly.

Gino, of all folk seemed absent, until into waterlogged skiff I looked and there with plastic straws nostrily applied, yet underwater and seemingly content. `Just let him rest, ' suddenly spoke Father Laffagut, whom unbeknownst had been there all the while, hiding behing the jubjub tree. ` I have seen everything, and I know everything' he smiled demurely, `Now, let the mud-wrestling begin!!' Fair Mary Hairy Anne Rayce went an rassles with us all in the mud.

Suddenly a shrill whistle pierces the sky.

`Yikes, dinner time' I startingly exudes, `gotta go, Mom's a whistlin'.

I am Doktor Aethelwise Snapdragoon.