MIAMI, FL. Back in March 2026, state inspectors walked into El Rinconcito Paisa #4 on SW 24th Street and found what they had come to document before: roaches. On March 10, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation ordered the restaurant emergency-closed, giving the owner until March 11 to vacate. It was the third time in eight years that roach activity had forced the Colombian eatery to shut its doors.
The restaurant reopened the following morning at 9:29 a.m.
What Inspectors Found
El Rinconcito Paisa #4: Recent Inspection Pattern
The March 10 inspection produced eight high-severity violations and four intermediate ones. The roach activity that triggered the emergency order was documented alongside a set of violations that, taken together, painted a picture of a kitchen operating without several basic safeguards in place.
Inspectors cited the restaurant for having no employee health policy, or an inadequate one. They also found food contact surfaces that had not been properly cleaned or sanitized, and toxic chemicals stored or labeled improperly near food areas.
On the intermediate level, inspectors documented improper sewage or wastewater disposal, multi-use utensils that had not been properly cleaned, and inadequate ventilation and lighting.
When inspectors returned the next morning for a follow-up, three high-severity violations and three intermediate violations remained. The restaurant was cleared to reopen, but the record from those two days stood.
What These Violations Mean
Roach activity alone is enough under Florida law to warrant an emergency closure, and the reason is straightforward. Cockroaches travel between sewage, garbage, and food preparation surfaces, carrying bacteria including Salmonella and E. coli on their legs and bodies. A single roach observed in a food prep area represents a contamination pathway that cannot be mitigated while the restaurant stays open.
The absence of an employee health policy compounds that risk. Without a written policy requiring sick workers to report illness and stay away from food handling, a restaurant has no mechanism to prevent a worker with Norovirus from preparing food and serving it to customers. Norovirus accounts for roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food workers are a primary transmission route.
The improperly cleaned food contact surfaces cited on March 10 carry their own hazard. Cutting boards, prep surfaces, and utensils that are not properly sanitized can develop bacterial biofilms within 24 hours. Those biofilms protect bacteria from standard cleaning products, meaning a surface that looks clean can still transfer pathogens to every item prepared on it.
The improper storage of toxic chemicals near food areas raises the most acute short-term danger. Mislabeled or improperly stored chemicals can contaminate food directly, and the resulting poisoning can be rapid and severe, without the delayed onset that typically allows restaurants to identify a foodborne illness outbreak.
The Longer Record
The March 2026 closure did not arrive without warning. State records show 34 inspections on file for El Rinconcito Paisa #4, with 505 total violations documented across that history. That is an average of nearly 15 violations per inspection visit.
The two prior emergency closures both involved the same triggering violation: roach activity. The first occurred on July 5, 2018, and the restaurant reopened the following day. The second was the March 10, 2026 closure. The recurrence of the same closure-level violation eight years apart, at the same address, under the same license, is the most direct line in the facility's record.
The inspection history in the two years before the closure showed no period of sustained improvement. The May 2024 inspection produced 11 high-severity violations, the highest single-visit count in the recent record. The October 2025 inspection found six high-severity violations. The pattern across 2024 and 2025 was one of elevated severity counts with no inspection producing a clean result.
Even the follow-up inspection on March 11, the visit that cleared the restaurant to reopen, left three high-severity violations unresolved. A facility with 505 violations across 34 inspections and three emergency closures, two of them for the same pest-related reason, was back in service before noon on the day after its most recent shutdown.
Whether the violations documented on March 11 were subsequently corrected, and what the restaurant's inspection record looks like in the months since, was not reflected in the data available for this report.