Nicoletto's Plans Store, Truck, Kroger Rollout

Nicoletto's Pasta Co. will add 15 to 20 full- and part-time jobs when it opens a 3,000-square-foot restaurant in Mt. Juliet before the end of the year. The space will seat up to 60 people, a first for the company, and will include an Italian market, a coffee and espresso bar, and beer and wine service. It is the company's first location in Wilson County and its largest to date.

Brothers Danny and Ryan Nicoletto founded the company in 2014, selling handmade pasta at five farmers markets around Nashville. Their Donelson shop seats few and is run as what Ryan Nicoletto calls "a glorified takeout window." The Mt. Juliet build will be their first restaurant with a walk-in cooler, cutting trips to the production facility on Elm Hill Pike. Donelson landlord Mark Lineberry developed the Mt. Juliet property with the company in mind.

The restaurant is one of three moves landing in the final months of 2026. The company's food truck parked at Lost & Found, joining four other trucks at the East Side venue, a quarter-mile from its East Nashville location. Ryan said the truck carries a different menu there, with two to three pastas available nowhere else, plus soup when the weather turns colder. The truck will stay at least six months.

Dried pasta from the company has sat on shelves at about 400 specialty markets for years. In October, bronze-cut campanelle, radiatori and creste di gallo, along with jarred marinara sauce, reached about 70 Kroger locations in Middle Tennessee. Danny said he has gone to the Inglewood and East Nashville stores to see the products on display. The effort took more than 18 months of negotiating, after years of building relationships and developing the product.

The company hired a culinary director from Italy last month. Ryan said the hire will bring new dishes, new ideas and recipe tweaks. Danny said, "We're having more meetings than ever with our team." The brothers have worked together since the early days, from playing in a band to making pasta and opening restaurants, and they repair vintage pasta-making equipment themselves.

A Hillsboro Village restaurant opened shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic and closed in 2023. That same year, a small Donelson space opened near the production facility, and it showed the brothers that western suburbs like Mt. Juliet would suit them. The Mt. Juliet build is designed around their workflow, with room to display pasta on shelves. Ryan said, "This is drawing on 10 years of operating and hospitality experience to make the best Nicoletto's we possibly can." The lemon basil salad dressing recipe has not changed.

Danny said his background in touring and music shapes how they manage people. "We work the line with them. We work making pasta with them," he said. After an interview in late October, the brothers planned to make Italian beef sandwiches from a trailer at a Friends of Shelby Park event alongside their staff.