What is Dubai chocolate, exactly?
Dubai chocolate is a thick milk chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream and shredded, toasted kunafa pastry.
That is it. There is no secret ingredient. The reason it works is texture. You bite through a firm chocolate shell, then hit something soft and nutty, and then, right at the end, an unmistakable crunch that has no business being inside a chocolate bar. Your brain expects the crunch to be a nut. It is not. It is pastry, fried in butter until it snaps.
That single moment is the entire product. Everything else is packaging.
A few things it is not. It is not a Dubai government invention, and it is not an ancient recipe. It is not made from dates, although a date version exists and it is excellent. And, despite the name, most of the Dubai chocolate sold in the world today has never been anywhere near Dubai.
Who invented Dubai chocolate?
Dubai chocolate was created in 2021 by Fix Dessert Chocolatier, a small UAE company founded by Sarah Hamouda. The original bar is called “Can’t Get Knafeh Of It,” which is a much better name than the one the internet gave it.
The origin story is refreshingly ordinary. Hamouda was pregnant, she wanted the specific combination of chocolate and kunafa that did not exist in a bar, so she made it. The company stayed small and sold in limited daily drops through a delivery app in the UAE. For roughly two years, it was a local favourite that almost nobody outside the Emirates had heard of.
Then, at the end of 2023, a content creator named Maria Vehera filmed herself eating one in her car. The video was quiet, unpolished and about a minute long. It did not try to be anything. It went on to collect tens of millions of views, and by mid-2024 “Dubai chocolate” was a search term in about forty countries.
So when people ask which brand is the original Dubai chocolate, the honest answer is Fix. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What happened afterwards, though, is a different story.
What is kunafa, and why does it matter so much?
Kunafa (also spelled knafeh, kanafeh or kadayif depending on where you are standing) is a Middle Eastern pastry made from kataifi, which is dough shredded into threads so fine they look like pale hair. Traditionally it is layered with soft cheese, baked, and drenched in sugar syrup while still hot. It is served warm, it is stringy, and in Nablus, Damascus and Amman people will argue about it seriously.
For a chocolate bar, the pastry gets used differently. The kataifi threads are toasted or fried in butter until they are dry and brittle, then folded into pistachio cream. No syrup, no cheese, no moisture. That is what protects the crunch.
And that is exactly where most imitations fall apart. Kunafa goes soft the moment it meets anything wet. If the pistachio filling is too loose, or the bar has been sitting in a warm warehouse for four months, the pastry surrenders and you are left with a slightly gritty chocolate bar. If you have ever tried Dubai chocolate and wondered what all the noise was about, this is almost certainly what happened to you.
Getting it right at scale is a manufacturing problem, not a recipe problem. That is why the good ones are made by people who already knew how to work with kunafa before 2024.
How to tell real Dubai chocolate from a bad copy
Six things to check, in order of usefulness.
- Look at the ingredients list for kataifi or kunafa. If it says “wafer,” “crisped rice,” “biscuit pieces” or “crunchy filling,” it is not Dubai chocolate. It is a chocolate bar with something crunchy in it. There are a lot of these.
- Check the pistachio percentage. Real pistachio cream is expensive. Cheap versions bulk it out with sunflower oil, palm oil, sugar and green colouring. If pistachio is not in the top three ingredients, be suspicious. If the filling is a bright, uniform, almost neon green, be more suspicious. Real pistachio paste is a dull, slightly grey olive colour.
- Weigh it in your hand. A proper bar is heavy and thick, usually 100g and up, because the filling layer is generous. Thin bars cannot hold enough kunafa to matter.
- Listen to it. Snap it near your ear. You should hear two distinct sounds, the chocolate cracking and then the pastry. One sound means the kunafa is gone.
- Check where it was made. This is not snobbery. Kunafa degrades in transit and in heat. A bar made in the UAE and sold in the UAE has a much shorter, cooler journey than one made in a European factory in March and shipped to a Gulf supermarket in July.
- Ignore the word “original” on the packaging. Roughly every brand uses it. It means nothing.
Where Bateel fits into this
We have been growing dates and making chocolate in the region since 1936, which means we were working with kunafa, pistachio and single origin chocolate a very long time before any of this was a hashtag.
Our approach to the format was less about copying the viral bar and more about asking what else it could do. The kunafa and pistachio combination is a genuinely good idea. It is also not the only good idea.
So the range grew sideways. There is the classic Pistachio Kunafa Bar at 40g, which is the one to start with. There is a 130g Dubai Chocolate Bar with pistachio kunafa for people who found the 40g insulting. There is a hazelnut version, a matcha and strawberry version, and a qahwa version built around Arabic coffee, which sounds like a stretch until you try it and realise cardamom and dark chocolate were always going to work.
Then it left the bar format ehttps://bateel.com/en_us/premium-chocolates/pistachio-kunafa-bar-40g.htmlntirely. There are pistachio kunafa truffles, a kunafa gelato, and kunafa folded into our dates, which is the one nobody expects and the one that tends to convert people.
You can see the full Dubai chocolate collection or browse everything in premium chocolates.
Where to buy Dubai chocolate in the UAE
Three routes, in order of speed.
Online with same day delivery. Order from the Bateel UAE store before the daily cut off and it arrives the same day across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. This is the only route that guarantees the bar has been stored properly the entire time.
In our boutiques. Bateel stores across the UAE stock the full kunafa range, including the seasonal flavours that sell out online. If you want to buy several bars to compare, this is the better option.
In our cafés. Café Bateel serves the kunafa gelato and the plated desserts, which is the version to have if you want it warm rather than in a bar.
For gifting, the 6 piece Dubai chocolate gift pack is the standard corporate choice, and the 24 piece set covers a full office.
Where to buy Dubai chocolate in the US
This is the question we get most from outside the region, usually phrased with some exasperation, because for a long time the honest answer was that you could not.
You can now. Bateel ships across the United States from the US store. The chocolate is shipped in protective packaging designed for the kunafa specifically, because a bar that arrives with soft pastry is a bar that failed.
Start with the Pistachio Kunafa Bar if you are trying it for the first time. Go straight to the 6 piece gift pack if you are buying for someone else, because they will want to try more than one flavour and everyone does. The full range sits in premium chocolates.
A warning that will save you money. A lot of what is sold as Dubai chocolate on US marketplaces is unbranded, made in bulk, and has been in a container for months. Go back to the six checks above before you buy from anywhere you do not recognise.
How much does Dubai chocolate cost?
It is more expensive than a normal chocolate bar and it should be.
The cost is driven almost entirely by pistachio. Pistachio prices have climbed steeply since 2024, in large part because of this exact product, and a bar with real pistachio cream simply cannot be made cheaply. Add hand assembly, kunafa that has to be toasted in small batches, and a filling that cannot be pumped through standard machinery, and the price makes sense.
If you find a bar that costs the same as a supermarket own brand, the pistachio content is the thing that got cut.
Bateel bars start at the 40g size for a first try and move up through the 130g bars to gift sets. Current pricing for each market is on the UAE and US product pages.
Is Dubai chocolate still worth it in 2026?
The hype is gone, which is the best thing that could have happened to it.
What the frenzy hid was that the underlying idea was sound. Chocolate, pistachio and toasted pastry is a combination that would have worked in 1970 and will still work in 2050. It did not need a viral video to be good, it just needed one to be noticed.
Now that anyone can buy it on a normal Tuesday, the only question left is whether the specific bar in your hand was made by someone who cared about the crunch. That part has not changed at all.
Dubai chocolate FAQ
Does Dubai chocolate have kunafa in it?
Yes. Toasted kunafa pastry, also called kataifi, is the defining ingredient. If a bar does not contain kunafa, it is not Dubai chocolate regardless of what the label says.
Does Dubai chocolate contain pistachio?
Yes, in the classic version. The filling is pistachio cream mixed with toasted kunafa. Hazelnut, matcha and qahwa variations also exist, but pistachio is the original.
Who invented Dubai chocolate?
Fix Dessert Chocolatier, founded in the UAE in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda. The original bar is called “Can’t Get Knafeh Of It.” It went viral globally after a TikTok video in late 2023.
Can you buy Dubai chocolate in the US?
Yes. Bateel ships across the United States, with packaging designed to protect the kunafa in transit.
Why is Dubai chocolate so expensive?
Real pistachio cream is costly and pistachio prices have risen sharply since 2024. The bars are also assembled by hand and the kunafa has to be toasted in small batches.
What does kunafa taste like?
On its own, toasted kunafa is mild, buttery and mostly texture rather than flavour. Its job in the bar is the crunch. The flavour comes from the pistachio and the chocolate.
