The Chinese community rings in the Chinese New Year with parades and parties. Held each summer, the Kuumba Festival is a four-day cultural arts celebration of African food, music, storytelling and crafts. Gourmands can feast on a variety of ethnic foods at area restaurants, including Vietnamese, Indian and Egyptian. In fact, it would take at least two weeks to eat dinner at different ethnic restaurants without sampling the fare from the same country twice. Home cooking in East Tennessee doesn't necessarily mean beans and cornbread anymore.
Specialty stores carry foods from around the world.
Along Sutherland Avenue in West Knoxville there are Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Oriental and Indian markets, while Chapman Highway in South Knoxville is home to a pair of Mexican specialty stores. Immigrants and foreign nationals come to East Tennessee for many reasons. Students from 92 countries matriculated at the University of Tennessee last year, many of them graduate students who live in university-owned apartments on Sutherland Avenue. A large contingent of foreign nationals works at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the country's leading nuclear research centers. At Denso Manufacturing in nearby Maryville, Japanese executives work at the company's sprawling complex.