What is Dubai chocolate? The kunafa bar, explained.

Dubai chocolate is a style of filled chocolate bar: a thick chocolate shell around a center of pistachio cream and crispy kataifi — the shredded phyllo pastry used in kunafa, the Middle Eastern dessert the bar borrows its soul from. It was invented in Dubai, it went supernova on TikTok, and it is now made — with wildly varying levels of care — all over the world. Here is the honest version of the story, plus how we build ours.

Where it actually came from

The original is Fix Dessert Chocolatier’s “Can’t Get Knafeh Of It,” created in Dubai by Sarah Hamouda, who founded Fix in 2021 with her husband Yezan Alani after a pregnancy craving refused to be reasonable about kunafa. For a couple of years it was a local cult object — sold in limited drops through delivery apps, gone in minutes. Then, in December 2023, a TikTok review by the creator Maria Vehera turned it into a global one. That single video has been watched well over a hundred million times, which is the kind of number that launches an entire category.

What followed in 2024 was the great kunafa gold rush: copycat bars everywhere, pistachio cream selling out at wholesalers, and every chocolate maker on earth asking the same question — can we do this properly, or just quickly? Credit where it is due: Hamouda invented the thing. Everyone else, us included, is interpreting it.

What makes a bar “Dubai chocolate”

Strip away the hype and the recipe is a duet with a bodyguard. Pistachio cream carries the flavor — nutty, a little sweet, unmistakably green. Kataifi carries the texture: hair-thin pastry strands toasted in fat until they shatter. The chocolate shell holds the whole thing together and provides the opening act — a clean snap before the soft center and the crackle underneath. If any one of the three is phoned in, the bar collapses into candy. All three, done right, and it eats like an event.

How we make ours

Our Crispy Dubai bar is our interpretation, not an impersonation. The shell is milk chocolate, tempered until it snaps out loud. The center is Sicilian pistachio paste — the good kind, more pistachio than sugar — folded through kataifi we crisp in ghee, because butter browns and burns where ghee just toasts. Each bar is handmade in small batches in Alabama and costs $21.95, which is what a bar costs when the pistachios are real and a person watched every one leave the mold. The same rules apply to everything in our chocolate bar lineup, and if you want the full sermon on how we temper, there’s a page for that: our chocolate.

Questions people actually ask

Is Dubai chocolate actually from Dubai?

Yes. The original bar was created in Dubai by Fix Dessert Chocolatier, founded by Sarah Hamouda in 2021, and the name refers to where the style was born — not where the ingredients grow. The pistachios in most serious versions come from the Mediterranean (ours are Sicilian), and kataifi is a pastry shared across Greek, Turkish, and Middle Eastern kitchens.

What does kataifi taste like?

On its own, kataifi is mild — it’s essentially shredded phyllo, thin strands of wheat pastry. Toasted in fat, it turns deeply buttery and crisp, somewhere between the top layer of baklava and very good shredded wheat. In a Dubai chocolate bar its job is mostly texture: it’s the crackle that keeps the pistachio center from being just sweet paste.

Why did it go viral?

Three reasons stacked on top of each other: scarcity (the original sold out in minutes through app-only drops), a December 2023 TikTok review by Maria Vehera that has been viewed over a hundred million times, and a cross-section made for the camera — the cut-open bar reveals a bright green center and makes an audible crunch. It is possibly the most filmable candy ever invented.

What makes a good one?

Four things: real pistachio paste rather than sweetened filler, kataifi that was actually crisped in fat and stays crisp inside the bar, a properly tempered shell that snaps instead of bends, and freshness — the crunch fades as bars sit in warehouses. Cut one open: if the center is silent and the shell folds, keep walking.

If you’d rather taste the argument than read it, the Crispy Dubai bar ships cold-packed from Alabama, and it does not stay in stock out of politeness.