Two Hundred Kitchens at the Speedway, and Two Days to Get Through Them
Nashville Superspeedway is a mile and a third of concrete built for cars going very fast. This weekend it is being used, improbably and rather well, as a place to stand around eating.
FoodieLand is making its Middle Tennessee debut at the Lebanon track, and it runs through Sunday. Today's hours are 1 to 10 p.m., and Sunday is the same. It opened Friday afternoon. More than 200 small businesses are set up on site with global cuisines and artisan goods, alongside live entertainment, games and family activities.
The practical details
- Where: Nashville Superspeedway, 400 Victory Lane Drive, Lebanon
- When: Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 10 p.m.
- Parking: free, with the on-site entrance via McCrary Road
- Kids: five and under get in free
- Tickets: buy them online before you go — admission is not sold at the gate
That last point is the one that catches people out. This is not a walk-up-and-pay event, and a family that drives to Lebanon expecting to hand over cash at the entrance is going to have a bad afternoon. Buy first, then drive.
A word on timing, too: the gates open at 1 p.m. but the event is built for the evening. The string lights, the live music and the best of the crowd energy all belong to the back half of the day, and so does the Middle Tennessee weather in late August — the difference between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on a paved lot in this part of the world is considerable. If you can only make one stretch of it, make it the later one.
Why this is a bigger deal for Wilson County than it looks
FoodieLand started in Berkeley, California, in 2019 and now runs more than 22 events a year across a string of cities. It is a travelling operation with a real following, and the fact that it chose Lebanon for its Middle Tennessee debut rather than a lot closer to downtown Nashville is the interesting part.
Nashville Superspeedway has spent the past several years quietly becoming Wilson County's default answer to a question the county did not used to get asked: where do you put something enormous? The track has the acreage, the paving, the traffic ingress and the parking that a 200-vendor festival needs and that almost nowhere else between here and Nashville can offer without shutting down a downtown. Matt Greci, the speedway's general manager, has welcomed the event to the property.
For Mt. Juliet, the practical upshot is a genuinely large festival roughly twenty minutes east, on a weekend, with free parking — which is a rarer combination than it sounds. Most events at this scale are downtown, and downtown means paying to leave your car somewhere and walking further than you planned.
If you go
Go hungry, go later, and go in a group — the entire economics of a 200-stall food festival favor people willing to split things four ways and try eight. Bring a card; most festival vendors have long since stopped dealing in cash.
And if the weekend leaves you wanting more of the same closer to home, there is plenty on: Mt. Juliet's first Burger Week is also in its final days, with thirteen local restaurants serving $9 burgers through Sunday. Our local's guide to Mt. Juliet covers the rest of the year.
