Vol. 1 — No. 5Weekend Episode · Thu–Sun, Jul 16–19, 2026 · South Knoxville, TN★ soknoear.com
Vol. 1 — No. 5 · Jul 16–19★ soknoear.com
The South Knoxville Ear — We Hear Things.
Wanna party in the Dirty South?
★ Tonight's plan: happy hours → music → karaoke →
Kern'sSat

Disco Chicken turns one — with a gluten-free festival and a silent disco

Knoxville's first all-gluten-free restaurant marks a year at Kern's on Saturday: a festival all day, and a silent disco that picks up where the third-place match leaves off.

One year in the coop

A year ago a fully gluten-free fried chicken counter opened inside Kern's — the first all-gluten-free restaurant in Knoxville. Since then Disco Chicken has been written up as one of the best gluten-free restaurants anywhere, which is a sentence that ends with "in the world" and starts in South Knoxville.

When
Sat, Jul 18 · all day
Where
Kern's, 2201 Kern's Rising Way
Silent disco
9–11 PM
Also Saturday
Free barre on the event lawn, 9:30 AM · Jaystorm Duo, 6 PM

Saturday it turns one. The food hall is running a Gluten Free Festival all day around it, and then — this is the good part — a silent disco from 9 to 11, scheduled, per Kern's own listing, to keep the energy up after that afternoon's watch party. Headphones on, everybody dancing to nothing, in a food hall, for a chicken's birthday. We'd call that peak SoKno.

If you're making a day of it: there's a free barre class on the event lawn at 9:30 that morning, the third-place match at 5, Jaystorm Duo playing covers 6 to 9, and then the disco. That's a full Saturday without leaving the building.

Original Dirty South Map Found

Click to see the original map of Knoxville’s Dirty South that was recently unearthed for the public to see.

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