Boka Group’s Alla Vita opens June 13 in Nashville

Boka Restaurant Group is about to finish its Nashville push with a restaurant built around the kind of pasta and pizza that gets diners paying attention. Alla Vita is set to open June 13 in Wedgewood-Houston, bringing handmade pastas, wood-fired pizzas and Italian comfort food into one of the city’s most closely watched dining neighborhoods.

That opening matters because Alla Vita is not arriving as a standalone debut. It is the third piece in Boka’s Nashville rollout, following Momotaro and Middleman, and that sequence gives the new Italian spot extra weight for anyone tracking where the city’s restaurant scene is heading next. In a market still adding new concepts at a steady clip, Boka is using Alla Vita to close out a three-restaurant introduction with a clear neighborhood strategy rather than a one-off splash.

Chef Lee Wolen is behind the concept, and the menu framing points directly to the strengths that have made Alla Vita stand out elsewhere: a warm, fun, food-first room with a serious pasta program at its core. Handmade noodles are a major part of the identity, and the dishes being highlighted so far, including ricotta dumplings and rigatoni alla vodka, signal a kitchen leaning into texture, comfort and the kind of Italian cooking that lands with both casual diners and pasta obsessives. Boka’s leadership has also pointed to Wolen as a major pasta talent, a detail that suggests the group sees this as more than a generic corporate Italian opening.

For Nashville diners, June 13 marks the arrival of another high-profile handmade-pasta option at a time when the city’s restaurant growth is still reshaping neighborhoods one opening at a time. For Wedgewood-Houston, it adds a new anchor concept from a group that has already planted two other flags nearby. And for the pasta crowd, Alla Vita is the one to watch because it combines restaurant-group scale with a menu built around the labor, precision and comfort that handmade pasta demands.