Do Buy, Dubai: Have Your Virtue and Eat It Too

I caught myself thinking in something like AI-generated copy today, when I almost began this piece with the line, “There’s something about excess that wants to look tasteful.” Which, in itself, feels like a discourse for another essay altogether.

There is something about excess that wants to look tasteful. My mind often compares it to something not wanting to be regarded as indulgence. Something wanting to be mistaken for care, curation, almost - dare I say - a moral attentiveness.

To want excess - it is not the having that troubles us, but the way it might be perceived. So excess learned to borrow the language of virtue. It called itself intentional. It presents itself as edited, curated, almost ethical. In doing so, it asked, and continues to ask not to be forgiven, but to be misunderstood.

My son came home with chocolates today. Dubai chocolates.

“They’re not really from Dubai,” he says, “I don’t think Dubai chocolates are Dubai.”

Wdym?

Typical teenage reaction: He shrugs, tosses the chocolates into the fridge and gets lost in his text messages.

What followed was an hour of what I can only describe as maternal detective work, equal parts fact-finding and desperate bid for connection. I googled "origins of Dubai chocolate."

What I found was a story that had been flattened into a trend. A chocolatier named Sarah Hamouda. A Filipino chef named Nouel Catis Omamalin. A shop called Fix Dessert Chocolatier. A pistachio kunafa filling that shredded, syrup-soaked pastry with centuries of Levantine history, encased in chocolate and branded with the name of a city. The videos came next. Cross-sections revealing the pale green interior, the pull and stretch of kataifi threads, the ASMR of first bite. Content designed to be watched before it is eaten. Perhaps instead of eaten.

I thought of Susan Sontag, who wrote in On Photography that "today everything exists to end in a photograph" - and that taking photographs is "a way of certifying experience" but also "a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir." The Dubai chocolate, (however its taste) exists first as spectacle of indulgence staged for the consumption of eyes rather than mouths.

The chocolate, like so much else in our lives, is a promise dressed in branding. A hint of place, a suggestion of story, a claim to authenticity that may or may not be real. And yet, that claim, however tenuous, is part of its appeal.

I realise, with a small, wry amusement, that I have spent my afternoon tracing its lineage not for the chocolate itself, but for the way it wants to be seen: tasteful, curated, intentional. In this, the Dubai chocolate is the perfect metaphor for excess.

And Dubai, as the namesake, makes perfect sense. It is a city that exists as assertion, built on the premise that you can will something into being through sheer audacity and capital. There is no false humility in Dubai, no pretence of modesty. The city has always known exactly what it is: a monument to the idea that desire, given enough resources, becomes reality.

The chocolate inherits this ethos. I do not judge it for that. I find it, in its way, strangely coherent.

But I notice how quickly the sweetness fades.

After the third bite, the mind begins to wander. The richness becomes too resolved, too finished. There is no room for longing. There is no imperfection to return to. And God, I need them in everything. No sticky residue on the fingertips, no crumb demanding attention. Luxury, when done relentlessly, feels airless.

Still, I eat the chocolate when it is offered. I enjoy it. I smile at the drama of it all. The gleaming surface, the theatrical cross-section. And then, later, quietly, I find myself craving something simpler. Plain milk chocolate, broken from a bar. Something that does not petition for my admiration, does not arrive pre-narrated with origin story and aesthetic claim.

Perhaps what we call simplicity is not the absence of desire, but desire that has stopped performing. Pleasure that exists without audience, without the anxious loop of how it might be seen.

I think of my son, already indifferent to the chocolate he brought home, its magic evaporated the moment he stopped scrolling past videos of it. He has, without knowing it, moved on to the next thing. And perhaps that is its own kind of wisdom. The recognition that the sweetness is always fading, always was going to fade, and the only question is whether we will notice when it does.

There is something about excess that wants to look tasteful.

And there is something in us that keeps believing it, keeps reaching for the promise, keeps hoping that this time, the having will be enough. It never is. But we go on wanting anyway.

This, I suspect, is simply what it means to be human, to live among objects that gleam with borrowed meaning.