The Viral Dubai Chocolate Bar Makes It to Dallas

The viral Dubai chocolate bar has been making the rounds on the internet this summer, impressing TikTokers and Instagrammers alike. Naturally, it reached Dallas, where bars around the Metroplex pop up as influencers eat them in their cars, cracking open the hard chocolate exterior to reveal a vibrant pistachio butter inside. However, many of the locally-made bars spotted have cheap-looking milk chocolate, the design of a Hershey bar, and little info about how they were made or why. Such is the problem with influencers eating in their car content — it is more of a reaction video than an endorsement or informational.

When the bar appeared on the Instagram feed of Dude, Sweet Chocolate in Bishop Arts, we got owner and chocolate maker Katherine Clapner on the phone to talk about the phenomenon and why she’s getting in on it.

“We were getting a bunch of calls, right, for this Dubai bar?” Clapner begins, merging into a soliloquy on how she’s trying to get into social media and be more responsive to it. “I just kind of blew it off, but eventually thought let me Google it. Then I was like, well that sounds fucking delicious.”

Courtney E. Smith

Fucking delicious indeed. Clapner took a close look at other bars and arrived at the same conclusion as us: most of these look like trash (the phrase “was a real pistachio ever involved?” is uttered), but pistachio butter is outstanding when made correctly, and who wouldn’t want to eat it as the creamy center of a chocolate bar?

The most time-consuming part of developing her recipe, Clapner says, was creating kataifi, a Middle Eastern pastry with a texture similar to phyllo dough. That gets toasted with butter and has pistachios added. Clapner notes that the chocolate in the bar is fragile, so we see many shapes of it in that extra large size to hold the pistachio butter — cheap chocolate that gets poured in huge swaths to hold it together doesn’t have that problem. She also notes that her pistachio isn’t completely smooth because it isn’t going into a giant machine. Her butter also uses agave, salt, and sweetened condensed milk.

Clapner says her shop is making them in rounds of 100 to see how the demand feels, only pouring up a new batch when the old one runs out. As with all things fragile and chocolate, she was mindful of the packaging. It is sold in a plastic sheet to protect it and then placed inside a small box with padding roughly the size of the bar and tied with twine. Each bar is hand-packed by her team. Clapner says that all the prep and packaging means it takes seven days to make each bar, so she doesn’t see them being a forever item on her shelves.

Get them while you can.