BOCA RATON, FL. Back in February 2026, state inspectors walked into Cali Aji on North Federal Highway and found what the records describe as rodent activity, a finding serious enough to shut the restaurant down on the spot.
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation ordered the restaurant at 4251 N Federal Hwy vacated by February 20, 2026. The closure was the second emergency shutdown in the facility's documented history.
What Inspectors Found
Cali Aji: Recent Inspection Severity
The February 19 inspection produced eight high-severity violations and four intermediate violations. Rodent activity was the trigger for the emergency order, but it was not the only serious finding that day.
A follow-up inspection was conducted the very next morning, February 20. Inspectors still found six high-severity violations and two intermediate violations, a count that would be alarming in a routine inspection. The restaurant was nonetheless cleared to reopen at 8:57 a.m. that day.
Six high-severity violations remained at the moment the doors reopened.
What Rodent Activity Means for a Restaurant Kitchen
Rodent activity in a food service facility is not a paperwork problem. Mice and rats move through a kitchen at night, across prep surfaces, through food storage areas, and along the same counters where food is prepared and plated the next morning.
Rodents carry Salmonella, Leptospira, and Hantavirus, among other pathogens. They do not need to be seen by kitchen staff to contaminate food, because their droppings, urine, and fur shed continuously wherever they travel. A customer eating at Cali Aji on February 18 would have had no way of knowing what inspectors documented the following day.
That is precisely why Florida law treats confirmed rodent activity as grounds for an immediate emergency closure rather than a warning or a scheduled follow-up. The risk is not theoretical and it does not resolve itself overnight. The fact that six high-severity violations remained when the restaurant reopened on February 20 underscores how quickly the state moved to restore access, even with serious findings still on the books.
The Longer Record
The February 2026 closure did not come out of nowhere. Across 31 inspections on record, Cali Aji has accumulated 208 total violations. That volume, spread across the facility's inspection history, points to recurring problems rather than isolated incidents.
The inspection from September 23, 2024 produced nine high-severity violations and two intermediate violations, the highest single-day severity count in the recent record. A follow-up the very next day, September 24, showed zero high-severity violations, a turnaround that mirrors the pattern around the February 2026 closure: a severe finding, a rapid follow-up, a return to compliance on paper.
The March 2025 inspection found seven high-severity violations. The August 2025 inspection found three. By the time inspectors arrived in February 2026, the facility was back to eight high-severity violations on a single visit, plus the rodent activity that closed it down.
This was not the first time the state had ordered Cali Aji to stop serving customers. The facility's record shows one prior emergency closure before February 2026, meaning this most recent shutdown was the second forced evacuation in its history. The inspection record does not show a facility that has been gradually improving. It shows a facility that reaches compliance after pressure, then accumulates violations again before the next serious inspection.
What the Recent Inspections Show
After the February 20 reopening, inspectors returned on February 27, 2026. That visit found zero high-severity violations and one intermediate violation, a significant drop from the eight high-severity findings just eight days earlier.
The March 27, 2026 inspection found zero high-severity violations and zero intermediate violations. On paper, that is a clean inspection.
The pattern is consistent across the facility's history: a serious finding, a closure or a high-violation inspection, a rapid return to compliance, and then a gradual accumulation of violations leading to the next serious event. The September 2024 cycle followed that arc. The February 2026 cycle followed the same arc.
What the record does not show is a sustained stretch of clean inspections between the serious ones. The March 11, 2025 inspection, which came roughly six months after the September 2024 crisis, still produced seven high-severity violations.
Whether the clean inspections of late February and March 2026 represent a genuine turning point, or simply the beginning of the next cycle, is a question the inspection record alone cannot answer. The 208 violations logged across 31 inspections at this address suggest the question is worth watching.