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?
Someone bought me some Dubai chocolate a while ago during the peak of the trend. I genuinely really enjoyed it and would’ve wanted more if it weren’t for the price, and also that it isn’t vegan. The packaging said it was made in Turkey, which put me a bit at ease given how messed up Dubai is; nevertheless I found it troubling how something named after freaking Dubai was suddenly everywhere, it definitely rubbed me as an attempt to reform the emirate’s PR and as a very strange trend overall. People looked very silly talking about it like it was the best thing ever.
Edit: Of course, being made in Turkey is absolutely not a guarantee that the chocolate was produced ethically — it’s still chocolate at the end of the day. I believe that after I finished the piece I was given that I said, “I wonder how hard it would be to make this at home.” Naturally, I also did some research into what the heck kadayif even was, which was an interesting enough tangent.
There’s also the factor that Dubai is associated with Luxury, and luxury goods have been popular the last few years. Probably the most since the 1980s.
Eating 10 €/bar Dubai chocolate is a more affordable Andrew Tate style statement “I’m better than you poors”
I vaguely remember getting into an argument with someone a long time ago when he tried to make an analogy about something that basically took it for granted that everybody would prefer a luxury sports car if they could get their hands on one; I said that my own dream car was actually a secondhand VW Golf Mk2 and he pretty much lost his mind about it, because he couldn’t fathom that somebody would prefer the exact opposite of a luxury good. Point is that I sometimes forget that Andrew Tate is how a lot of people think.