DORAL, FL. El Machetico at 9674 NW 25 St was ordered closed by state inspectors on August 20 after they documented roach activity at the Doral restaurant, triggering an emergency shutdown and a vacate order effective the following day.
The restaurant reopened at 9:40 a.m. on August 21, after a follow-up inspection found only one remaining violation, a citation for inadequate ventilation and lighting, with no high-severity violations on the books.
What Inspectors Found
El Machetico: Recent Inspection History
The August 20 inspection produced six high-severity violations and four intermediate violations. The state's records list roach activity as the condition that triggered the emergency closure order, the most serious enforcement action available to Florida inspectors short of license revocation.
The follow-up inspection the next morning cleared the high-severity findings. The single remaining citation, inadequate ventilation and lighting, was classified as intermediate.
What This Means
Roach activity in a food service environment is one of the conditions Florida law treats as an immediate threat to public health, which is why it carries the authority to shut a restaurant down on the spot. Roaches move between sewage, garbage, and food preparation surfaces. They carry pathogens including Salmonella and E. coli, depositing them on any surface they cross.
A customer eating at a restaurant with active roach activity has no way to know the surfaces their food touched, or the utensils used to prepare it, have not been contaminated. That is the specific risk the closure was designed to stop.
The intermediate violation that survived the August 21 follow-up, inadequate ventilation and lighting, carries its own health consequence. Poor ventilation allows grease-laden vapors, carbon monoxide, smoke, and steam to accumulate in kitchen spaces. Over time, grease buildup in unventilated areas also creates conditions that make pest infestations harder to detect and easier to sustain.
The Longer Record
The August 20 closure was not the first time state inspectors have shut El Machetico down. The facility's record shows one prior emergency closure in addition to last week's, making this the second time in its documented history that conditions at the restaurant were severe enough to warrant an immediate shutdown.
Across 22 inspections on record, El Machetico has accumulated 192 total violations. That volume, spread across roughly two years of documented visits, averages nearly nine violations per inspection.
The pattern in the recent inspection record is consistent. The March 2024 visit produced eight high-severity violations and three intermediate violations, the highest single-visit count in the recent history. The September 2025 visit found four high-severity violations. The February 2025 visit found four more. Even the March 2026 visit, five months before the closure, produced one high-severity citation.
There was no inspection in the record between March 2026 and the August 20 closure, a gap of nearly five months.
The Pattern
What the record shows is a facility that has not sustained a clean stretch. Of the eight most recent inspections, only two produced zero high-severity violations. One of those was the October 2024 visit that appears to have been a same-day follow-up to a separate October 2024 inspection that found three high-severity violations.
The other zero-high-severity result was the August 21 follow-up inspection conducted the morning after the emergency closure, after staff had the night to address the conditions inspectors had documented.
El Machetico is licensed as a permanent food service establishment. The restaurant did reopen on August 21. Whether the conditions that produced 192 violations and two emergency closures have been addressed in any lasting way is a question the inspection record, so far, has not answered.
