About the Organizer

It all begins with an idea. Karen Hardin has been a force in Knoxville, Tennessee since the 1990’s, where she began her journey into the world of hospitality. Karen worked in many hotel and banqueting establishments as a banquet server, gaining valuable experience towards her road to strike out on her own.

This journey would segway into many opportunities for Karen, bringing her to open up her very own business, Allow Me, LLC, right here, in the heart of Knoxville, a star was born. Karen literally blazed trails with her newfound business and independence to show new expressions of banqueting experiences for the populace of this wonderful southern city. Right here under the Tennessee sun, Karen was putting together new, memorable, enriching experiences for the citizens of Knoxville.

In just the past 5 years, Karen began to have a vision with various marketing strategies to help other upcoming small business owners to achieve growth and exposure through creating small pop-up shops all over East Knoxville. Vendors flocked to her pop-ups with the enthusiasm to learn these new strategies and the results have been astounding with many of these small business owners branching out into other ventures and becoming very successful within their respective communities. This has been phenomenal as well as extremely rewarding to watch.

Then there came the day in 2023 that Karen was offered the opportunity to branch out beyond pop-ups and banqueting to servicing whole communities through larger events, thus venues, starting right here in Knoxville, with A Taste of Tennessee Food and Music Festival! This promises to be the most rewarding event that Karen has ever hosted and is hopeful that every Knoxvillean and those in surrounding counties, cities and states will come to the World’s Fair Pak and experience in real time, on May 25th and 26th, 2024!

We will see you there for a festival that will change the way festivals are done here in Knoxville. We look forward to seeing each and every one of you!