Bronze-Cut Pasta on Lebanon Road, and It Is the Biggest Room They Have Built
There is a particular kind of business that Mt. Juliet has been waiting on without quite saying so out loud. Not another drive-thru. Not another gas-station-anchored pad site. Something with a counter you stand at, a case you look into, and a reason to come back on a Tuesday. Nicoletto's is building one on Lebanon Road.
The family pasta company is putting its third Middle Tennessee restaurant at 11324 Lebanon Road, and by the numbers it will be the biggest thing they have ever built: roughly 3,000 square feet, larger than either of the rooms that made their name. Construction is beginning now, with the target opening set for this fall.
Pasta first, everything else after
Nicoletto's was started by brothers Ryan and Danny Nicoletto, and the whole enterprise rests on one decision most restaurants never bother to make: how the pasta is cut. They extrude theirs through bronze dies in small batches, which is slower, fussier, and produces a noticeably rougher surface than the slick Teflon-pressed alternative. The point of that roughness is entirely practical — sauce clings to it. It is the difference between a sauce that coats a noodle and a sauce that slides off one into the bottom of the bowl.
The Mt. Juliet menu will carry the same fresh small-batch bronze-cut pastas and house-made sauces as the East Nashville and Donelson rooms, along with the sandwich side of the operation — Italian beef, and sausage and peppers on a hero.
What the extra square footage buys is everything around the pasta. The plan calls for a curated market of Italian and specialty goods, a coffee and espresso bar, and beer and wine service. That is a meaningfully different animal from a fast-casual counter. It is a place you can stop into for a jar of something at five o'clock, or sit down with an espresso at ten in the morning, or eat dinner at seven. For a suburb that empties out toward Nashville every evening, a room that works across three different parts of the day is not a small thing.
Why this address, and why now
Lebanon Road is having a decade. The corridor is in the middle of the most concentrated run of new construction Mt. Juliet has seen, and the road itself is finally getting the money to grow into the traffic it already carries — a federal grant of roughly $12 million toward the right of way for a five-lane widening with sidewalks, a project residents have been promised for years and have learned to be skeptical about. Anyone signing a lease on this road right now is making a bet on what it looks like after the orange barrels leave.
It is also, quietly, the second time in recent months that a food business has chosen this stretch and had to reckon with the ground before the building. A short way up the road, crews raised a site five feet before the steel went up. Growth on Lebanon Road has become as much a drainage question as a zoning one.
This will be the company's first restaurant in Wilson County, which is the part worth noticing. Nashville food businesses have historically treated the county line as the edge of the map, opening a second location four miles from the first and calling it expansion. Choosing Mt. Juliet — and putting the largest version of the concept here rather than the smallest — is a read on where the customers actually live now.
What happens between now and fall
Construction is underway, with the development handled in partnership with Lineberry Developments and the KSR Group. The company has said it will share construction progress and hiring information as the opening gets closer, which for anyone hoping to work there is the sentence to watch for.
Until then, the county is not short of good tables. Start with our guide to the Best Restaurants in Mt. Juliet, and if you are trying to keep track of everything going up along this corridor, we mapped it in what newcomers need to know about where the growth is going and in the Lebanon Road widening.
