They Started at Farmers Markets With Vintage Italian Machines. The Next Storefront Is on Lebanon Road.
Mt. Juliet has spent the last decade collecting the restaurants that Nashville proved out first. Sometimes that means a chain. Occasionally it means something with a decade of history and a genuine point of view, and this is one of those.
Nicoletto's Italian Kitchen is building its third Middle Tennessee location at 11324 Lebanon Road, and it is expected to open in fall 2026. Construction is underway now, with Lineberry Developments and KSR Group on the build.
What is going in
At roughly 3,000 square feet, the Mt. Juliet store will be the largest the company has built. The core is the same as the East Nashville and Donelson kitchens — fresh-made pasta and Italian dishes, everything from scratch — but the extra room is going somewhere specific.
There will be an expanded Italian specialty market, a coffee and espresso bar, and beer and wine service. That combination is the interesting part. A market means you can buy the pasta and the sauce and cook it at home on a Tuesday. An espresso bar means the place has a reason to be open at nine in the morning. Together they turn a restaurant into something closer to a neighborhood grocery that happens to serve dinner — a format Mt. Juliet does not currently have and, given how the Lebanon Road corridor is filling in, has room for.
The company has said it will share construction updates and hiring information as the opening gets closer, which is worth watching if you want one of those jobs.
Where this came from
Nicoletto's is not a concept assembled by a restaurant group. It was started by two brothers, Ryan and Danny Nicoletto, who began by making pasta and selling it at farmers markets and to restaurants. To do it properly they tracked down vintage Italian pasta-making machines — the real ones, the heavy ones — and spent years testing recipes and the business model before they ever opened a door to the public.
The first brick-and-mortar arrived in East Nashville in 2016. A Donelson café followed. In the background, the dried-pasta side of the business has grown into a factory that has tripled in size to keep up with wholesale and mail orders.
That order of operations matters. Most restaurants start with a dining room and hope the product holds up. This one started with the product and added dining rooms once it was sure. It is the reason a ten-year-old Nashville pasta shop can walk into Wilson County with an actual reputation rather than a marketing budget.
The Lebanon Road context
Lebanon Road is where Mt. Juliet's growth has been landing. It is the corridor that carries commuters west toward Nashville and east toward Lebanon, and it has been steadily accumulating the retail and restaurant density that used to require a drive to Providence Marketplace or into Davidson County. A from-scratch pasta kitchen with a specialty market attached is a meaningfully different addition to that mix than another drive-through.
Fall is not a date, and construction schedules slip. Treat this as a heads-up rather than a reservation — and in the meantime, our guide to the best restaurants in Mt. Juliet covers what is already open and worth the drive. If you are newer to town and still learning the geography, the local's guide to Mt. Juliet maps the rest of it.
