Oktoberfest around the world
What happens when a festival emigrates
Oktoberfest travels well. The format is simple and portable — long tables, big glasses, a brass band, a tent — and versions of it now run on every inhabited continent, in cities that have never had a German community and some that very much have.
What doesn't travel is the food.
Regional cuisine is stubbornly local. It depends on what grows nearby, what butchers know how to cut, what people's grandmothers made. So when a German festival takes root somewhere else, the beer arrives more or less intact and the menu quietly recombines with whatever was already there. Southern Brazil ended up with a stuffed duck. Cincinnati invented a breakfast dish of pork and oats that exists almost nowhere else. Qingdao serves draft beer in sealed plastic bags.
Those adaptations are more interesting than the imports, and they're what this page is about.
Two kinds of Oktoberfest
It's worth separating them before going further, because they're not the same phenomenon.
Settlement festivals grew out of actual emigration. There was a German-speaking community in place first, with its own bakeries, butchers, churches and dialect, and the festival is an expression of a culture that was already there. These places have hybrid cuisines that took generations to form.
Imported festivals are organised around the idea of Oktoberfest — usually by a brewery, a bar or a tourist board — in cities with no German history behind them. Many are excellent parties. They are simply a different thing, and the food is generally an approximation of Munich rather than an evolution of anything local.
This piece is mostly about the first kind. No disrespect intended to the second: a well-run themed festival is a good night out. It just doesn't produce a cuisine.
Blumenau, Brazil
The state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, received substantial German immigration from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. Blumenau was founded as a German colony in 1850, and German dialects are still spoken in parts of the region today.
The festival itself is far more recent than the settlement — it began in the 1980s, and is generally said to have grown out of the city's efforts to recover after severe flooding. It's now one of the largest Oktoberfests anywhere outside Germany, held in a purpose-built complex, with parades and competitive stein-carrying alongside the drinking.
The food is where it gets interesting. Santa Catarina's German-Brazilian cooking is a genuine hybrid rather than a copy. Its signature dish is marreco recheado — stuffed duck, usually filled with a bread and offal stuffing, roasted and served with red cabbage. It's German in technique and thoroughly Brazilian in execution, and it's the centrepiece of the region's festival tables. Alongside it you'll find chucrute, the local sauerkraut; eisbein, cooked much as it would be in Berlin; and cuca, a streusel-topped sweet cake that's now eaten across southern Brazil by people with no German ancestry whatsoever.
The beer is chopp — Brazilian draft lager, served very cold, in a climate that makes that a necessity rather than a preference. And because this is the southern hemisphere, October is spring. The whole autumnal, harvest-end logic of the original festival inverts completely.
Villa General Belgrano, Argentina
A small town in the hills of Córdoba province, built in a central European alpine style, which has run Argentina's national beer festival since the 1960s.
The town's German-speaking population has an unusual origin story. It's commonly said that the community was shaped in part by sailors from the Admiral Graf Spee, the German warship scuttled off Montevideo in 1939, whose crew were interned in Argentina and some of whom settled inland afterward. It's a story worth treating with some care — it's repeated widely and the details vary in the telling — but the town's central European character is unmistakeable either way.
The food follows Austrian and southern German lines more than Bavarian ones: chucrut, sausages, goulash, strudel, and a serious tradition of central European pastry and cake. What makes it Argentine is the meat culture around it. This is a country with its own profound relationship to grilling and to beef, and the festival food sits inside that rather than beside it.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Cincinnati took in enormous German immigration through the nineteenth century — enough that one of its central neighbourhoods is still called Over-the-Rhine, after the canal that immigrants crossed to get home. Its Oktoberfest, running since the 1970s, is generally described as the largest in the United States.
But the thing worth travelling for isn't the festival. It's goetta.
Goetta is ground pork and beef cooked down with steel-cut oats, onion and herbs, set firm in a loaf, then sliced and fried until the outside is deeply crisp and the inside stays soft. It descends from Westphalian sausage-making, where oats or grain stretched expensive meat, and it survived in Cincinnati long after it faded in Germany. It is eaten for breakfast, it is beloved locally and almost unknown fifty miles away, and it is exactly what this page is about: a dish that could not have happened in Germany, and could not have happened anywhere else in America either.
The festival itself leans cheerfully into spectacle, including a race of costumed dachshunds and a mass chicken dance. It is not solemn about its heritage, which is arguably the most German-American thing about it.
Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario
Ontario's Oktoberfest has run since the late 1960s in a region settled largely by German-speaking Mennonites, whose farming and food traditions still shape the area — summer sausage, rye breads, preserved fruit and vegetables, shoofly pie, and one of the better farmers' market cultures in North America.
It also runs around Canadian Thanksgiving in October rather than following the Munich dates, a small adaptation that says something about how these festivals bed into a local calendar.
One piece of history belongs here. Kitchener was called Berlin until 1916, when anti-German feeling during the First World War forced a name change. It's a reminder that these communities didn't always get to celebrate their origins openly, and that the cheerful festival version of German heritage abroad is a relatively recent luxury.
The unlikely ones: Qingdao and Windhoek
Qingdao, on China's Shandong coast, was a German concession from the late 1890s until the First World War. The Germans built a brewery, which is why Tsingtao exists and why the city now hosts an enormous annual beer festival.
Almost nothing about the food is German. What's eaten is Shandong coastal cooking — clams, prawns, grilled squid, peanuts — alongside the beer, and the beer itself is often bought fresh from a barrel and carried away in a sealed plastic bag with a straw. It's the clearest example in the world of the format surviving completely intact while the contents changed entirely.
Windhoek, in Namibia, has German bakeries, butchers and breweries, and its own Oktoberfest. That inheritance comes from German colonial rule, which included the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in the early twentieth century — a history Namibia and Germany are still formally reckoning with. It should be named rather than skipped past. The food culture that remains is genuinely distinctive: German-style baking and charcuterie alongside Namibian meat traditions and southern African braai culture.
What travels, and what doesn't
The pattern holds across all of them. The beer exports easily, because beer is a product and products move. The shape of the party exports easily too — tables, music, scale, the specific pleasure of eating and drinking shoulder to shoulder with strangers.
The cuisine doesn't. It arrives as a set of techniques and habits rather than as a menu, and then it meets local ingredients, local butchery, local weather and local taste, and it becomes something else. Stuffed duck in Santa Catarina. Oats and pork in Ohio. Sausage and strudel in the Argentine hills.
Germany, for what it's worth, has been on the receiving end of exactly the same process. Schaschlik — skewered, charcoal-grilled meat — arrived in Germany from further east and became a fixture of German outdoor cooking, as we describe in Schaschlik, the German charcoal feast. Food travels in every direction, and it never arrives unchanged.
For what's eaten at the original, see what Germans actually eat at Oktoberfest and our full guide to Oktoberfest food and drink. For the beer itself, Oktoberfest beer explained covers what's actually poured in Munich and what reaches the rest of us.