The viral “Dubai chocolate” bar — pistachio cream and crispy kunafa — spawned a spin-off in South Korea: the “Dubai chewy cookie.” It swept Korean cafés and social feeds through 2025, and in early 2026 the Korean-born version has now landed in Dubai itself, the city that inspired the original. A flavour idea travelled across the world, got reinvented, and came home in a new form.
It is a food trend behaving like a meme. A dessert jumps borders, mutates in another country’s café scene, then boomerangs back to its namesake — each version riding the last one’s hype. The signal: trends no longer spread out from a single origin; they loop between markets, and the remix can become as big as the original.
So…:
Where could you remix a trend from another market — and would it travel back to where it started?
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Gulf News