Culture on the plate

In addition to cooking classes, Milwaukee offers plenty of other ways to learn about immigrant or ethnic food. Here are a few opportunities:

Yes, our city has a boatload of ethnic festivals, including Polish Fest, Festa Italiana, German Fest, Irish Fest, Bastille Days, Mexican Fiesta and Indian Summer Festival.

The annual Holiday Folk Fair International is a multicultural event that will take you around the world.

Old World Wisconsin in Eagle has re-creations of farmsteads and settlements established by European immigrants where you’ll see and smell ethnic food being cooked by interpreters in the various houses.

You can try ethnic food in a restaurant — Somali food, for example, at Blue Star Café, 1619 N. Farwell Ave., whose owners fled that eastern African nation in the 1990s. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel restaurant critic Carol Deptolla wrote last summer in her review: “The foods of Somalia, in the Horn of Africa, tell the tale of the country’s place in spice trade history; scents of cumin, cinnamon, cloves and more rise from the plates.”

At the Milwaukee Public Museum, the traveling exhibit Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture opens March 3.

The state’s largest refugee educator, International Learning Center, 639 N. 25th St., has twice-a-year potluck gatherings, one at Christmastime and one in the spring. Each event draws about 150 refugees and supporters, according to Claire Van Fossen, director of development for Neighborhood House of Milwaukee. The center is a program of the Neighborhood House.