If you’ve looked around and checked some menus, you’d see that “Dubai chocolate” is all the rage. I saw Lindt selling it while leaving the grocery store, the bougie donut shop has a seasonal Dubai chocolate donut, and a cart opened up selling it locally too.
How has pistachio + chocolate been able to inspire such a marketing blitz? Why do 3 real estate conglomerates in a trench coat pretending to be a country need to invent a new dessert? Lastly, since Dubai is close to Iran, where I assume they source their pistachios, shouldn’t all this pistachio stuff be red?
It is not a particularly inventive thing. Kadayif is widely used in various desserts in Middle-east and it is often serviced with pistachios. It is more Levantine than Gulf dessert, that’s why pistachios are used since pistachios grow in the area and are used commonly in and on desserts. That chocolate is just a slopified version of kadayif and is alike many of the other chocolates with filling where some sort of mush is covered by chocolate, none of which I particularly like.
Reason why it got so popular is because social media hype, obviously. Dubai is an artificial city sustained by the wealthy and influencers marketing it on social media so it proliferated quickly that city is directly connected to social media hype and glamour culture.