FORT LAUDERDALE, FL. Back in February 2026, state inspectors ordered Brunia's Caribbean Take Out Restaurant at 3630 N SR 7 shut down after finding roach activity in the kitchen, marking the third time in the restaurant's history that regulators had seen enough to pull its operating authority on the spot.
The closure was ordered on February 11, 2026. The restaurant was required to vacate by February 12 and reopened later that same morning.
What Inspectors Found
Brunia's Inspection History: High-Severity Violations
The closure on February 11 came alongside seven high-severity violations and three intermediate violations. The roach activity was the trigger, but it was not the only serious finding that day.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for food not cooked to required minimum temperatures. Undercooking poultry, for example, allows Salmonella to survive, and inspectors flagged this as a direct pathogen-survival risk.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled, a condition that can cause acute poisoning through contamination or mislabeling. Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized, creating a pathway for bacterial transfer between raw and ready-to-eat foods.
Handwashing failures appeared twice in the same inspection. Inspectors cited both inadequate handwashing by food employees and improper hand and arm washing technique, two separate violations that together indicate the problem was not an isolated lapse but a systemic one.
The Most Recent Inspection
The April 14, 2026 inspection, the most recent on record, returned eight high-severity violations and three intermediate violations. That is a higher high-severity count than the February inspection that triggered the emergency closure.
Among the violations cited in April: no employee health policy or inadequate policy, and employees not reporting symptoms of illness. Those two violations together remove the primary institutional safeguard against a sick food worker transmitting Norovirus or other pathogens directly to customers.
A person in charge was not present or not performing duties during that April visit. Single-use items were found being improperly reused, and multi-use utensils were not properly cleaned. Inadequate ventilation and lighting rounded out the intermediate violations.
What These Violations Mean
Roach activity is one of the few conditions that Florida regulators treat as an automatic emergency closure trigger, and for clear reasons. Cockroaches carry and shed pathogens including Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, depositing them on food prep surfaces, equipment, and food itself. A customer eating at a facility with active roach activity has no way of knowing the surfaces their food touched were contaminated.
The handwashing violations documented on February 11 compound that risk. Improper handwashing is the single most significant factor in spreading foodborne illness, according to public health data, and citing both inadequate washing and improper technique in the same inspection suggests the issue was not one employee on one shift.
The absence of an employee health policy, flagged in April, removes the mechanism that would require a sick worker to stay home. Without that policy in writing, a worker with Norovirus, which causes roughly 20 million infections in the United States annually, has no formal obligation to report symptoms before handling food.
The food temperature violation is a separate and independent risk. Cooking food to required minimum temperatures is the last reliable kill step for pathogens that may have contaminated raw ingredients. When that step fails, whatever bacteria survived handling, storage, and prep reaches the customer's plate alive.
The Longer Record
Brunia's Caribbean Take Out has been inspected 42 times and has accumulated 353 violations across its recorded history. That volume places it well outside the range of a restaurant encountering occasional compliance gaps.
The February 2026 closure was the restaurant's second roach-related emergency shutdown. The first came on May 9, 2017, also for roach activity, and the restaurant reopened two days later on May 11. The same violation category, nearly nine years apart, closed the same restaurant twice.
The inspection record between those two closures does not show a period of clean compliance. The July 2024 inspection produced nine high-severity violations and two intermediate violations, the highest single-inspection total in the recent record. The September 2025 inspection found five high-severity violations. Two inspections in March 2025, conducted on consecutive days, together documented nine high-severity violations.
Every inspection in the eight-visit sample available in the record found at least three high-severity violations. Not one inspection in that span came back clean.
The February 12 callback inspection, conducted the morning after the closure order, found one high-severity violation and one intermediate violation, a significant drop that satisfied the threshold for reopening. The April 14 inspection, conducted roughly two months later, found eight high-severity violations.
