BY LINDA BARNARD | PHOTOS BY JEFFREY BOSDET
Take a bite out of Victoria’s own take on the viral Dubai chocolate bar.
Move over, Dubai. Safaa Naeman thinks Victoria deserves its own homegrown take on the viral pistachio chocolate bar.
In February, the owner of Syriana Restaurant and Catering started making and selling the lusciously crunchy-gooey bars encased in rich white, milk or dark chocolate shells.
“I decided just to do it because we use kataifi all the time in our place. And I know the recipe for it. So absolutely I can do it,” says Naeman, whose Esquimalt café was named Best Middle Eastern or North African Restaurant by YAM magazine last year.
Kataifi is the hero ingredient in the Dubai-born chocolate bar that has been beguiling social media for months. It’s a thread-like spun dough, its filaments fried in ghee (clarified butter) for a nutty flavour. Kataifi is used in dozens of desserts in the Middle East, Mediterranean, Greece and Turkey, as well as some savoury dishes, but for the Dubai chocolate bar, it is broken into small pieces and mixed with tahini (sesame paste) and lightly sweetened pistachio butter or pistachio cream to create a thick filling with a satisfying crunch.
“I love the crispy filling,” Naeman says.
From Dubai to the Island
The chocolate bar that inspired her is the one the whole world seems to have been talking about for months: the TikTok-famous “viral Dubai chocolate bar” created last year by Dubai entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda at FIX Dessert Chocolatier. (You can, if you wish, order it direct from Dubai at fixdessertshop.com)
Hamouda calls her indulgent, brick-like confection “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” as a nod to a classic dessert made with kataifi. Kunafa (or knafeh) is a sweet-savoury baked cheese dessert topped with toasted kataifi, simple syrup and pistachios. Its name comes from kanaf, an Arab word meaning “to shield or protect.” For kunafa, the “shield” is the topping of kataifi.
While Naeman’s is the only knafeh bar currently made in Victoria, other retailers have been selling different versions of it.
In December, owner Mohamad Salem Ajaj imported 500 pistachio kataifi bars from Istanbul to sell at his Damascus Food Market. Thanks to word of mouth, they sold out in two days at his Hillside Avenue store.
Showcase stores at Hillside Shopping Centre and Tillicum Centre sell 75-gram, Canadian-made Oasis Treasures Dubai Chocolate bars for $9.99. Besides the white chocolate-pistachio kataifi version, they carry other stuffed varieties like cookies and cream and pecan caramel.
Meanwhile, Oh Sugar on Johnson Street has started selling the Dubai Pistachio Knafeh Dessert Bar created by Vancouver-based Hype Chocolate.
“Oh Sugar has been such a great partner for us since day one,” says Scott Symons, who founded Hype in 2022 with his partner Marlayna Pincott. Hype has made its name with elevated-yet-fun quality chocolate bars like Everything Bagel, Dunkaroos, Holy Duck Chili Oil and milk chocolate and White Rabbit candy.
Knafeh Dessert Bar
Hype’s pistachio bar is a pricey indulgence at $30 for a 220-gram bar. (A typical chocolate bar is 50 to 100 grams. Dessert bars are bigger and twice as thick. They’re a new trend, says Symons, designed to be shared and enjoyed.)
Symons says the cost comes from the ingredients, the most expensive of which is the lightly sweetened pistachio nut butter made by Delta company, NutJar. The kataifi, organic tahini and ghee inside the Belgian milk chocolate bars comes from Middle Eastern markets on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. “What we’re trying to do as well is supporting the culture that supplies these ingredients,” Symons says.
Symons sells the chocolate bars online across North America. Like FIX in Dubai, he sells his bars by pre-order only in Vancouver.
“I didn’t want to do this just to jump on a viral trend and sell something to make money,” he says. “I wanted to give people of Vancouver and North America the experience of this chocolate bar as they should, as it deserves.”
The Taste of Freedom
In December, when the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, it was a sweet moment for Victoria’s Syrian community, who celebrated in the best way possible: with pastries. Over at Damascus Food Market on Hillside Avenue, owner Mohamad Salem Ajaj offered a steady stream of joyful customers pistachio baklava and other sweets in celebration.
Meanwhile, at Syriana in Esquimalt, owner Safaa Naeman was sipping cardamon-scented coffee with a visitor one afternoon when a young man came into her café and bought every last pastry. He was taking the desserts to his workplace to give to his co-workers, sharing with them a sweet taste of freedom.
Pistachio Dreams
If you want to try your hand at making your own version of the kunafa bar, Fig Mediterranean Deli carries frozen kataifi as well as jars of Pisti pistachio cream from Italy. Damascus Food Market, meanwhile, offers three varieties of frozen kataifi for home cooks as well as the Dutch-made Gold Medal ghee that Ajaj recommends for frying it.
Naeman makes her own pistachio cream, using a commercial blender to mill Turkish pistachios with sesame oil, a touch of vanilla and a little sugar until smooth. She then fries Krinos-brand frozen kataifi dough in ghee until it’s golden, breaks it up and adds it to the silky cream to make the filling.
She also uses kataifi in ballourieh, a delicious small square of whole pistachios in syrup pressed between two layers of kataifi, and would like to start making freshly baked kunafa to order for customers. “People back home in Syria love the dessert fresh from the oven with the cheese stretchy and soft,” she says. (Damascus Food Market sells ready-made frozen kunafa in two sizes: a single-portion dessert and a pizza-size disc.)
Because sweets mean celebration in her homeland, Naeman feels desserts make her customers feel welcome. She’s always working on new recipes and plans to expand the glass showcase in the dining room to show them off. In January, she added sweet cheese rolls and haresa semolina and coconut cake to Syriana’s menu. She’s also worked the pistachio filling into Syriana’s crispy baklava triangles, calling them Victoria Baklava.
But first there’s her knafeh bar (prices still to be determined). The milk and white chocolate bars are her favourites, and she’s loved “the magic” of painting green-tinted white-chocolate swirls on the bars. In fact, this was her first time working with chocolate, which can be tricky to temper properly so it has a glossy finish and signature snap.
As Naeman says, “Chocolate is a different world.”