Where to Eat and Drink Near Great Smoky Mountains National Park | Eater

"You’ll need to load up on carbs before summiting Clingmans Dome, and there’s no better place to do that than at downtown Knoxville’s dashing Emilia. The Italian restaurant, serving cuisine inspired by the Emilia-Romagna region, has a lot of the requisite Italian decor: brick walls, rows of wine bottles behind the bar, and oversized cans of tomato sauce doubling as decoration. But this warm retreat eschews red sauce Americana in favor of a more delicate, refined approach to pastas and entrees. Look for lightly fried baby artichoke fritters brightened with lemon-caper aioli, warm house-pulled burrata with roasted local squash, and Springer Mountain Farms chicken cooked under a brick until crispy and served with oregano pan sauce and salsa verde. The house specialty, though, is the pasta. It’s all made in house and served in ever-changing variations, like campanelle with roasted mushrooms and broccolini in a pine nut-mushroom broth, or fusilli carbonara with a poached Windy Acres Farm egg and toothsome bacon from Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham." - Matt Kirouac