Meet the Filipino chef behind TikTok’s viral Dubai chocolate bar

Top videos of the "Dubai chocolate bar" on TikTok captured on Sept. 30, 2024. (Supplied)

• One video of the chocolate-pistachio dessert bar has racked up over 80m views
• Filipino chef Nouel Catis Omamalin says his flavors are inspired by a sense of nostalgia

MANILA:  On TikTok, people’s feeds have been taken over by the “Dubai chocolate bar,” a gooey and crunchy candy stuffed with crispy knafeh and a creamy pistachio spread. 

The bar, with its artistic paint-like exterior, and textured, green-colored filling, shot to social media fame last December when UAE-based food influencer Maria Vehera posted a video of herself enjoying a taste, racking up over 80 million views to date. 

Since then, millions more have watched other content creators reacting to this viral confection, while cooks and businesses have created copycat versions across the globe, from New York to Auckland. 

Originally sold by Fix Dessert Chocolatier in Dubai, “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” is the brainchild of Filipino chef Nouel Catis Omamalin and British Egyptian entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda, who partnered in 2021 to launch the company. 

When Hamouda tapped Omamalin for his culinary expertise to create a chocolate bar brand that was “beyond ordinary,” he sought inspiration for his flavors through nostalgia. 

“I always go back to the nostalgia of things, the childhood memories of a certain culture, even any culture in general,” he told Arab News. “It never goes wrong when you think about nostalgia.” 

Omamalin thought of knafeh — the Middle Eastern dessert with chunks of pistachio enjoyed as a treat by Arab children — and how it had a particular crunch that lent itself well to chocolate.

“Everyone was just having the same kind of (chocolate) bar, and we thought, why not have a dessert in a chocolate bar? And knafeh is my favorite Arabic dessert,” he said. 

“So, I thought, let’s try to fuse them, and the challenge was to make it like dessert on top of chocolate without making it too sweet. That’s how the pistachio knafeh came about, because this is something that I am really passionate about in the kitchen — to recreate how nostalgia in this region would be enjoyed in a different manner.” 

Omamalin was born and raised in the Philippines, and trained as a pastry chef at L’Ecole Valrhona Paris. He has been running a culinary consulting company in Dubai for the past 15 years. Although he was no longer a partner at Fix when the chocolate bars went on sale in 2022, he stayed on to help perfect the candy. 

“I was working as a friend of Sarah’s,” he said. “I was helping her out because I really wanted her to succeed.” 

This entailed creating the bars by hand during the early days, a painstaking process that took Omamalin and his team six to eight hours to complete — from manually piping the filling to letting it set and packaging the items.

The process meant that only 25 bars could be produced each day, which meant the products sold out almost immediately. Fix has since scaled up its operations, but the bars still to sell out regularly in Dubai. 

Global social media fame also sparked high demand in other countries, including the Philippines, where unofficial resellers sell the Fix bars as high as $32 a piece, almost twice its UAE price. 

The Filipino chef, who grew up in Dipolog City in the southern Philippines, said living and working in Dubai since 2009 had given him a platform “to play around with ingredients” and “interact with different cultures.” 

After graduating from the University of the Philippines, and later studying pastry and baking at the French Culinary Institute, Omamalin pursued a career in the hospitality industry, before eventually moving to Dubai in search of greener pastures. 

“I’ve always been an artisan and I needed to craft something that is really different from anyone else,” he said. 

“I wanted to be the first Filipino who would break ground… I think that has always been my driving force up to now.” 

With the viral chocolate bar now being recreated across the globe, Omamalin found validation for his work. 

“For me, the biggest form of flattery is always when you copy someone’s work, and I have no problem with that at all because it means you’ve done something over and above what you have expected,” he said. 

“When people copy you that means you’ve really triggered a lot of their emotions or creativity.”