2026 Is a Growth Year for Nicoletto’s Pasta Co.

Nicoletto’s Pasta Co. has been a fixture in Nashville since 2014, when brothers Danny and Ryan Nicoletto started selling their handmade pasta at five farmers markets around town.

They were a tiny startup, learning to hand-make pasta as a tribute to their late father. Even as they expanded to open restaurants, they kept it small. (Ryan calls their Donelson shop “a glorified takeout window.”) They’ve grown slowly but deliberately, and now there are significant expansions taking place, making 2026 a banner year for the pasta and restaurant company.

“It’s been a wild year of growth that is all hitting this month,” Danny says.

Before the end of the year, Nicoletto’s will open a 3,000-square-foot restaurant Mt. Juliet, their first in Wilson County and their largest to date. In addition to offering more of their signature sandwiches, salads and pastas — and seating for up to 60 people, a novelty for their brand — the Mt. Juliet space will include an Italian market stocked with specialty Italian pantry items, oils and spices, and a full coffee and espresso bar, plus local beer and wine service. It will be their first restaurant (including the now-shuttered Hillsboro Village location) with a walk-in cooler, reducing the number of trips back and forth to their production facility.

The Mt. Juliet expansion comes as the Nicoletto’s food truck rolled into Lost & Found, making it one of five food trucks serving the East Side hang. Lost & Found is just a quarter-mile from the flagship East Nashville Nicoletto’s location, so the truck will have a different “secret” menu, Ryan says, with two to three pastas not available elsewhere and soup once the weather turns colder. The truck will be on site for at least six months.   

And the brand’s dried pasta, which has been available in about 400 specialty markets for years, is getting a big-name expansion too. This month, bronze-cut campanelle, radiatori and creste di gallo, along with jarred marinara sauce, arrived on the shelves of about 70 Kroger locations in Middle Tennessee.

“It’s so exciting,” Danny says, to be able to go to the Inglewood and East Nashville Krogers and see Nicoletto’s on the shelves. The effort took more than 18 months of negotiating and years before that of building relationships and the right product. 

Last month they hired a culinary director from Italy. With that hire, Ryan says, they’ll be able to introduce some new dishes and bring in some new ideas and recipe tweaks. 

“We’re having more meetings than ever with our team,” says Danny. “It’s exciting to see people get excited about what we do.”

Over the years, the brothers have worked together in many capacities, from playing in a band to selling pasta and opening restaurants. They have a division of labor, each with their own specialties. But like most entrepreneurs, sometimes they have to do it all, from making pasta to changing a tire on the delivery van. They source vintage pasta-making equipment and repair it themselves.

The opening of the Mt. Juliet location will create 15 to 20 full- and part-time jobs in the area, and while staffing is always a challenge for small businesses, the brothers rely on their music industry experience to take a different approach.

“It comes from our background touring and playing music,” Danny says. “We love working alongside people. We’re in it with them. We work the line with them. We work making pasta with them. We’re not the type of owners or bosses who just kind of sit on the sidelines, so we’re learning together.” After their joint interview with the Scene on a recent afternoon, the brothers had plans to work at a Friends of Shelby Park event, making Italian beef sandwiches from the trailer alongside their staff.

These new moves aren’t their first expansion efforts. They opened a restaurant in Hillsboro Village in a former home right before the COVID-19 pandemic; that location closed in 2023. That same year, they opened a tiny space in Donelson, convenient to their production facility on Elm Hill Pike, and it showed them that western suburbs like Mt. Juliet would be a good fit. Their Donelson landlord, Mark Lineberry, developed the Mt. Juliet property in mind.

“This is drawing on 10 years of operating and hospitality experience to make the best Nicoletto’s we possibly can,” Ryan says.

The Mt. Juliet location is designed specifically for them, letting them build around their flow and avoid some of the challenges of working in the small spaces they’ve had in East Nashville and Donelson. They’ll be able to display pastas on shelves. 

“Instead of looking at this opportunity and asking, ‘What can we do with the space?’ it was an opportunity for us to say, ‘What do we need and what do we need to be able to do for customers, and to create a place that actually has a welcoming nature?’” Ryan says. “Hopefully, a community follows suit where it’s not crammed into a shoebox. It’s kind of a 10-year dream that’s finally coming to fruition, where we’re able to say, ‘Yes, we can,’ instead of, ‘Where are we going to put a coffee machine?’”

While many things will change, the Nicolettos are committed to consistency and to the recipes Nashvillians love, such as the lemon basil salad dressing, which has never been tweaked, and the Italian beef sandwiches, which have been through several iterations. (The latter started as a late-night-only menu item.) Danny’s daughter is a fan of ziti with pink sauce, while Ryan’s kids love the buffalo chicken mac — the spicier, the better. Switching to Bear Creek Farm beef earlier this year has made Ryan’s go-to dish spaghetti and meatballs. Danny leans toward an Italian beef sandwich or a meatball sub.

When thinking about the long-term future, the brothers like the idea of their now-young kids taking over the business one day, but it will be a no-pressure situation. The freedom their mom gave them to pursue music careers shaped how they developed the business, and that slow-and-steady approach is part of their secret sauce.