Canberra Multicultural Festival 2015: Five foodie things to love

• Road closures and bus changes planned for Multicultural Festival
• Multicultural Festival to feature Hawaii among old favourites

Pineapple extravaganza

The American contingent in Canberra always brings good game to the Multicultural Festival and this year is no exception. The theme is pineapples, representing Hawaii. It'll be colourful, sweet and very sunny, with pineapple themed dishes, ukuleles, palm trees and more Hawaiian t-shirts than an APEC meeting.

Dueling meats on sticks

This festival's built a strong reputation for its meat on sticks and every year the challenge for foodies is to find something newer, more meaty, and more on a stick than the last time. Kransky on a stick? Did that last year. Chips on a stick? A traditional favourite. Iranian lamb on a stick? That's more like it. For bonus points, try to find the most unusual thing on a stick to eat - one year it was German pickles, another year there were rumours of nachos on sticks.

Joining a queue without quite knowing what it's for

This is the only way to surrender yourself to the festival. The crowds through Garema Place and its surrounds are huge. There are always people flooding past and it can be difficult to work out what's on offer behind the glass cases of some stalls. So you might as well join a queue because you think there might be good food at the end of it. You're bound to get something to eat on a stick. And there's always an element of luck in the queuing anyway - you might join the line for a share of the giant, five-foot diameter Spanish paella in the Latin American quarter only to find yourself emerging with German pickles on a stick and no memory of the past 10 minutes.

The loukoumades eating competition

The Greek Glendi is another institution at the Multicultural Festival - there are always energetic Greek dances, plenty of stalls serving up souvlakis and lamb on a spit, lots and lots of baklava and the chance of a massive plate smashing. This year the Glendi program promises a loukoumades eating competition on Sunday afternoon. What a way to end a weekend, filling yourself with sweet, glorious Greek doughnuts.

All the beer

You need it to wash down the pupusas, the loukoumades, the injera and the cassata. There are beers that you've never heard of and beers that you'll never hear of again. Fanatics can rack up record scores on Untappd (the beer app), downing everything from Croatian ale, craft beer from the United States, new beers from local brewers and South African pilsners. The Wig & Pen's Malty Cultural beer from a couple of years ago probably wins the label stakes.

The Multicultural Festival runs from February 13-15 in Civic. See multiculturalfestival.com.au for more.