Dubai Drama

The Fad is Clear. The Applications are Vast. The Origins are Complicated

By Caroline Mays

You can find creamy, crunchy “Dubai Chocolate” everywhere now: Baskin Robbins features a Dubai Chocolate ice cream cake and sundae. Shake Shack serves a Dubai Chocolate Pistachio shake, and IHOP has Dubai Chocolate pancakes. Ghirardelli offers a Dubai-Style Chocolate Sundae. Even street vendors are putting their own spins on the trend by topping cups of strawberries with pistachio cream, knafeh, and chocolate.

The beginning of “Dubai Chocolate” is as juicy and complex as its flavor profile.

In 2021, engineer and entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda founded FIX Dessert Chocolatier in Dubai, where she debuted several creative chocolate bars that included ingredients and flavors common in the Middle East. “I grew up between cultures with Egyptian and British flavors,” Hamouda said in an interview with Tatler earlier this year. The bar called “You Karak Me Up,” includes karak, a chai-like tea, while “Butter to Be Safe Than Salty” includes baked sweet cinnamon filo pastry, and vanilla custard with caramel and peanut butter. But “Can’t Get Knafeh of It,” made of a milk chocolate shell filled with crispy knafeh, pistachio and tahini paste, was the bar that went viral.

“I was pregnant with my second daughter and had this intense sweet tooth for something nostalgic but with a twist,” Hamouda told Tatler. “Every evening, my husband would drive around Dubai trying to find something that hit the mark, but nothing ever quite landed.”

Foods with a nostalgic element are powerful, and that’s what Hamouda wanted to make. “I was after more than a sugar rush,” she told Tatler about her creative process. “I wanted that pause, that wow, that moment when your eyes widen and your taste buds do a double take. . . I was crafting little bites of feeling.”

But beyond the pregnancy story and the description of feelings that Hamouda wanted to inspire in her customers, there is little specific information about the process of how these flavors came together.

According to Chef Nouel Catis, that’s because he is the creator of the “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” bar. Catis is the CEO of the brand that carries his name. His book Noel’s Nifty Chic Baking is an amalgam of Arabic, French, Asian and Western influences. He has two chocolate lines, including the popular SNA’AP collection of artisanal chocolate and his Corporate Line that partners with entrepreneurs, airlines and other hospitality brands. In an interview with Arabian Business, the Philippine-born Catis told reporter Tala Michel Issa that “it was really the intention to have an equal partnership, where I put my money into the technical side, the operational side, while [Hamouda] does the branding [and] marketing.” But by the time the FIX bars went viral, Catis had moved to “more of a support role,” as Issa described it, and was not credited with the invention.

“It’s kind of saying to chefs that their profession isn’t something you work hard on. We need to validate that chefs have worked to become who they are,” Catis told Arabian Business in April 2025. “Chefs are there because if you don’t have the skill set, they’re there to make things happen.”

However, in an Instagram post in spring 2025, Nouel also wrote that “no idea exists in isolation; it takes all contributing parts to bring it to life.”

SNA’AP includes the flavor “Dubai Chocolate,” made with “Pistachio Kunafa” and “folded into velvety 39% milk or bold 60% dark chocolate.” SNA’AP also makes a “Manila Chocolate,” an ube baklava bar, which blends milk chocolate with “sweet ube, crunchy cashews, and flaky baklava.” “Strawberry Fields” is a white chocolate bar with strawberry bits, crunchy lotus and cheesecake.

When Pastry Arts contacted Catis by email in August, his team replied that he would only be available for an interview if the final story did not in any way reference FIX Dessert bars because of what they described in the reply as “potential infringement concerns.”

Hamouda was not available to talk to Pastry Arts for this article.

Even though “Dubai Chocolate” is now known the world over, Hamouda’s FIX Dessert Chocolatier bar is still only available in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, through Deliveroo.

Catis’s SNA’AP bars are also only available in Dubai and Abu Dhabi through Careem, or in-store at Odean Restaurant.

And if this story weren’t complicated enough, the addition of social media makes it a hot mess.

Let’s leave the UAE for a moment and take a quick detour to South Korea, where mukbang videos were first invented. Mukbang, an extremely popular video genre on social media, was first conceived as a way for viewers to access virtual company during mealtimes. If they were eating alone, they could watch a mukbang video at the table so it didn’t feel so lonely. (Mukbang means eating show in Korean and is pronounced mook-bong.) Nottingham-Trent University psychologist Andrew Harris explained that for Koreans, “a sense of community, especially at mealtimes, is valued, but as more and more Koreans are living and eating alone, mukbang fills this need.”

However, as often happens in an environment where content is propelled by a mysterious algorithm bent on trying to keep viewers on social media apps for as long as possible, mukbang started to warp.

Social media platforms run on an “attention economy”: their business model means that they earn more money the more time users spend on their apps, so businesses try to make their apps as addicting as possible. This leads to algorithms routinely serving viewers more and more extreme content to keep them interested and engaged online. So mukbang videos morphed from people eating meals on camera to ASMR videos that amplify sounds of crunching, chewing, smacking, swallowing and gulping. These further morphed into fetish content, in which creators may, for instance, eat phallic foods with lots of sauce in a purposely messy way.

Current American mukbang videos can be unhealthy for teens and young people to watch, especially if they are susceptible to disordered thinking about eating. Some mukbang content creators have gained weight and suffered health problems because of the amounts of food they eat. “The West appears to have brought a contest or ‘food challenge’ element to the concept, not too dissimilar to those seen in popular TV shows, such as Man Versus Food,” wrote Harris.

One mukbang creator, Trisha Paytas, described some mukbang challenges she’d participated in, such as the 10,000-calorie challenge, the 20,000-calorie challenge, and the 100-nugget challenge. “You just feel so much pressure because you just want to keep one-upping yourself,” Paytas told ABC News about filming her food challenges.

At the same time, many modern mukbang creators are very thin, beautiful women, who regularly film themselves eating feasts of heavy, high-calorie foods. Of course, there is no video of them purging after their meals. As much as they deny it, there’s no possible way for them to eat like that so frequently—sometimes daily—and stay so thin.

This is the kind of video that TikTok influencer Maria Vehera makes. The influencer, based in Dubai, created what is an ostensibly ASMR video of herself messily eating three chocolate bars from FIX Dessert Chocolatier, including the “Can’t Ge Knafeh of It” bar. This is the video that went viral, garnering 124.6 million views according to The Spectator’s May 2025 story about “The Creeping Dubai-ification of London.”

Just as mukbang content has morphed into something different, so has Dubai Chocolate. FIX’s “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” bars and SNA’AP’s “Dubai Chocolate” bars are still only available in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Many people don’t know the story of its invention and the apparent fallout between collaborators, and the majority of people around the world have not tasted the UAE invention. Instead, the Dubai Chocolate flavor profile is known as being a social media phenomenon—and that demand from social media appears to be driving most of the Dubai Chocolate creations in the dessert worlds.

In West Hollywood, CA., Chef Anthony Keene started thinking about Dubai Chocolate when his wife and son returned home with a street-vendor sample that cost $18. But, his family said, “it was phenomenal.”

When writing the hotel menus for spring, Keene added a Dubai Chocolate shake made from Strauss’s organic cream, Sicilian pistachios, and Felchin’s Swiss chocolate. The pistachios are blended into the ice cream, not just sprinkled on top. While all pistachios are green, Keene said (PRES) that he chose Sicilian pistachios because of their vibrant color that’s “almost glow-in-the-dark.”

At Quail & Condor, in Healdsburg CA, Chef Melissa McGaughy created a Dubai Chocolate tart for Father’s Day. Because she is half Turkish, McGaughy wanted to use Turkish knafeh for her tart. The exterior chocolate shell is made with Dandelion chocolate, and the whole thing is topped with Sicilian pistachio cream. She said that Dubai Chocolate may make another appearance as a seasonal flavor around Christmas.

“I think that’s why people from all over connect with the bars, there’s something comforting and familiar, but also fresh and unexpected,” Hamouda told Tatler.

Reflecting on the Dubai Chocolate flavor profile, Keene talks about the power of nostalgic foods—both those that are familial and cultural. Eating something that reminds you of your childhood takes you back to a certain moment, and eating traditional foods is “almost like you’re experiencing the past,” he says, noting that you could be “eating something people ate 100 years ago.”

In separate interviews, both Hamouda and Catis have described the attention and iteration by other chefs as “flattering.”

“I’ve worked on so many brands that became iconic, and they all got copied. I’m okay with it, because it shows the idea works,” Catis told Arabian Business.

Social media fads often explode, sometimes implode, like a dying star—or a souffle. But given that the Dubai Chocolate trend uses traditional ingredients and tried-and-true texture contrast, the viral, tasty trend could either be a flash in the pan or the next solar system.

(This article appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)