DELRAY BEACH, FL. State inspectors walked into Excell Restaurant at 1044 S Congress Ave on July 9 and found enough roach activity to order the place shut down by the following morning, the fifth time in five years the restaurant has been closed on an emergency basis.
The closure order required the restaurant to vacate by July 10. It reopened later that same day, at 10:24 a.m., after a follow-up inspection found zero high-severity violations and zero intermediate violations on record.
What Inspectors Found
Excell Restaurant: Emergency Closure History
The July 9 inspection produced 7 high-severity violations and 1 intermediate violation. The state's inspection report lists roach activity as the condition that triggered the emergency order.
That is the same finding that closed the restaurant on September 26, 2022. It is the same finding, combined with rodent activity, that closed it on August 24, 2021, and again on June 23, 2021, just two months earlier.
What This Means
Roach activity inside a food service facility is treated as an emergency condition under Florida law because live cockroaches move freely between waste, drains, and food preparation surfaces. They carry bacteria including Salmonella and E. coli on their bodies and legs, and they deposit that contamination directly onto food, cutting boards, and equipment that customers' meals touch.
An emergency closure for roach activity does not mean an inspector spotted one roach near a drain. The threshold for an emergency order is active infestation, meaning live insects present in numbers and locations that represent an immediate risk to anyone eating food prepared in that kitchen.
The risk is not theoretical. A customer who ate at Excell Restaurant on July 9, before inspectors arrived or before the closure order was posted, had no way of knowing roaches had been documented in the facility. The closure order exists precisely because the ordinary warning system, a posted inspection report, does not reach customers in real time.
The July 9 inspection also included 1 intermediate violation. Intermediate violations typically involve issues like improper food handling procedures, inadequate employee training records, or failures in food safety management systems. They do not trigger closures on their own, but they indicate that the underlying practices producing high-severity findings are not being corrected at the procedural level.
The Pattern
The July 9 closure was not a surprise finding at a restaurant with a clean record. It was the fifth emergency closure at this address in five years, and the fourth time roach activity specifically was cited as the reason the state ordered customers out.
The inspections between closures tell the same story. On July 23, 2025, inspectors cited 7 high-severity violations and 1 intermediate, exactly the same tally as the July 9, 2026 closure inspection. No emergency order was issued that day. On April 10, 2024, inspectors found 5 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate violations. On January 23, 2025, they found 3 high-severity violations.
There was no inspection period in the past two years where the restaurant posted a clean high-severity record for more than a few months.
The Longer Record
Excell Restaurant has 39 inspections on record and 185 total violations documented across that history. That volume, across a permanent food service facility licensed to operate, reflects years of recurring findings rather than isolated incidents.
The two closures in the summer of 2021 came within nine weeks of each other, both for roach and rodent activity. The 2022 closure followed fourteen months later, again for roaches. Each time, the restaurant cleared a follow-up inspection within roughly 24 hours and reopened.
The rapid reopenings are a legal fact: the restaurant addressed conditions well enough to pass a same-day or next-day reinspection on every closure. What the record does not show is any sustained period in which high-severity violations stopped appearing between inspections.
The September 22, 2025 inspection is the only visit in the past two years that produced zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations. Every other inspection in that window found between 3 and 7 high-severity violations.
The restaurant reopened on the morning of July 10 after the follow-up inspection found no remaining violations. Whether the conditions that produced 7 high-severity findings on July 9 have been durably corrected, or whether the record will show another cluster of violations at the next scheduled visit, is what 39 inspections and four prior closures have not yet resolved.
