This is held every year here and is great fun and good food.
http://www.ci.slc.ut.us/arts/livingtraditions/
They close the street for a block and the various ethnic groups put up food booths from their cultures. Additionally, the park around the city and county building displays cultural crafts and traditions plus stages for the performing arts of the cultures. The neighboring library hosts other displays and movies. It's free to attend though food and things can also be bought as we did.
The way my family visits is like this. We pick out something to try, share it around and go to the next booth of interest. That way we get to try the greatest variety of different things.
From the Hawaiian booth we had a teriyaki beef stick. It was nostalgic for me as my mom taught school there (besides Alaska, and some other odd places) before it was a state and would make this sort of thing for our family. The kids had already declared the Shave Ice there would be our dessert.
From the Pakistani booth, we had a samosa, vegie curry and a chicken kabob. This must have been from a more eastern part of the country. The kabob was satay like with a peanut sauce. The vegie curry wasn't saucy, but very good. The samosa. was well executed, but never my favorite as I dislike peas. I preferred last year's Pakistan booth that was more Persian than Indian. Of course, where Pakistan is situationed, that's the food mix you'd expect there.
From the Phillipino booth we enjoyed some Lumpia and mango juice. It was canned, but the kids got a kick out of it.
We skipped the Tongan booth this year. There were more booths than last year too, so we may have to make it a two night affair to try more different things. We also skipped the Tibetan booth. We ate there last year and it was a bit too hot for the kids. Good though.
The lebanese booth was having a problem and so they were just serving some things they hand prepared earlier. All cold. The food is farily available in the area so we skipped it too.
We did visit the Salvadoran booth. There's a couple of enjoyable Salvadoran dives in town, but we hadn't been in a while. So we picked up some pupusas and a chicken tamale. The curtido hadn't aged as much as I like, but was a good accent the cheese and beans in the pupusas. Neither the Salvadorans nor the Peruvians were serving yuca frita this year, one of my favorites. We skipped the Peruvians as we were too full by the time we got to their booth later on.
From the remaining booths, we only ate a few. Just too much to try and not enough room. Many of these cuisines are served in town, so it wasn't such a big deal as we can eat them other times. There were Greek, Basque, Native American (great fry bread/Navajo Tacos last year), Mexican, Scottish complete with Haggis though it lacked some of the scary organs as they can't legally serve those here-- Italian, Swiss, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai.
What we did eat was Bonsian and Sudanese. There is a bosnisan joint on the way to Costco. I haven't tried it yet. We had cevapi, sort of gyro like sausage with tomatoes, onions, lettuce and such on an amazing flatbread. The flat bread was chewy and almost tough, but in such an enjoyable bread way. It was Ginormous.
The Sudanese was also a treat. We chose the spinach and onions over couscous. The couscous was the large style, what I see in the grocery store labeled as Israeli Couscous. Not a combination I would have put together, and the spinach heavily cooked down to a thick paste, it worked wonderfully. I don't suspect the original was made with spinach but some other local green back in Africa. Nevertheless, this was good soulful peasant food. They had a chicken stew, but I was about out of cash which I had to reserve for dessert or I'd have tried that too. The other interesting thing was to watch the women cook. I watched one chop a green pepper in her hand with a 10 inch chef's knife. I thought for sure she was going to mutilate herself. But then it dawned on me that she had probably never had a clean reliable surface to cook on before immigrating and that was just how the culture had to do it. She was quite skilled at it. Another person in line told me the people running the booth were supposed to have opened a restaurant. The booth was redolent of cinnamon though that spice was not in our chosen dish.
I posted about them once before,
http://www.cheftalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10559 I'm glad their enterprise is taking off.
I do have to admit, I have found out about a number of restaurants well below the radar by attending this event. Over the 15 or so years I've been going, I've had a lot of my first exposures there. And the last 5 years, the attendance is ramping up.
One of the cooking demos for tomorrow is naan. I plan on being to that one to refine my knowledge and technique.
Too much fun. If you're in SLC in May, try to come for the weekend this is going on, usually the weekend before Memorial day.
Phil
International Living Traditions festival 
