What Is Dubai Chocolate? The Pistachio and Kunafa Bar, Explained

If you have been anywhere near a phone since 2024, you have seen it: a thick bar of chocolate snapped in half to reveal a green, stringy, impossibly crunchy centre. It has a name now — Dubai chocolate — and it has changed what people expect from a filled chocolate bar.

It has also caused a certain amount of confusion. So here is what it actually is, where it came from, and what the pastry inside it has been doing for the last thousand years.

Where it came from

The bar was created by Fix Dessert Chocolatier, founded in Dubai in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda and Yezen Alani, a husband-and-wife team who had moved there from London. Their bar is called "Can't Get Knafeh Of It" — a filling of pistachio, tahini and knafeh pastry inside milk chocolate.

It went global in early 2024, largely through a single viral video, and the world attached a name the founders never chose. As Alani put it: "The world named it Dubai chocolate." The company has since gone from a home kitchen to counters at Dubai and Singapore airports and a concession at Harrods in London.

So "Dubai chocolate" is not a protected style or a regional designation. It is a nickname the internet gave to one bar, which then became shorthand for a whole category. Everything you can now buy under that name is somebody's interpretation.

What is kunafa, actually?

Here is the part most explainers skip. The crunch is not wafer, it is not rice, and it is not a proprietary invention. It is kataifi — wheat dough extruded into hair-thin strands, which looks like shredded wheat before it is cooked and turns amber and brittle when it is toasted in butter.

Those strands are the basis of kunafa — also written knafeh, kenefe, kunafeh or kanafeh, depending on which part of the Levant you are standing in. In its original form it is a hot dessert: kataifi layered over soft cheese or clotted cream, baked, and drenched in sugar syrup while it is still hot. It is served in Beirut, Damascus, Nablus and Amman, often for breakfast, often stuffed into a sesame bread roll.

The spelling varies because the word is being transliterated from Arabic, and no spelling is more correct than another. We write it kenefe, which is how it is said in Lebanon.

Why the texture works

A filled chocolate usually offers one contrast: a hard shell and a soft centre. Kataifi adds a third thing, and it is the one that makes the bar interesting.

Pistachio paste on its own is heavy — rich, sweet, and cloying by the third bite. Tahini cuts it, because sesame is faintly bitter and savoury and stops the pistachio from becoming perfume. The toasted kataifi then does something neither can do alone: it introduces dryness. A crunch that absorbs rather than resists.

That is why the bar works, and it is why a version made with wafer instead of kataifi tastes flat. Wafer snaps and disappears. Toasted kataifi keeps giving texture for the length of the bite.

Why a Lebanese counter finds this funny, in a good way

We have been selling kunafa chocolates since long before anyone called them Dubai chocolate. Not as a trend — as an obvious thing to do with a pastry we grew up eating.

Our Kenefe takes toasted kataifi under milk chocolate. Our Kenefe Caramel Biscuit (Dark) runs it against caramel and a caramelised biscuit note in a dark shell. Both sit on the counter alongside baklava and halawa, where they have been for years.

Neither is a copy of anyone's bar. They are what happens when a shop that already makes kenefe, baklava and maamoul in chocolate keeps doing the obvious thing with a pastry it knows well.

How to buy it without being disappointed

A few honest pointers, whoever you buy from.

Check for real pistachio. Pistachio paste is expensive and the colour is easy to fake. A bar that is aggressively, uniformly bright green is usually telling you about its food colouring, not its nuts.

Kataifi or nothing. If the ingredient list says wafer, crisped rice or "crunchy pieces", it is a different product wearing the same coat.

Fresh matters more than usual. Toasted kataifi goes soft with time and humidity. This is the one filled chocolate where a slow-moving shelf is genuinely detectable.

Buy a small amount first. It is a rich bar and not everyone finishes one. This is exactly what buying by the quarter pound is for.

And if the trend brought you here — good. Stay for the maamoul.