FLAGLER BEACH, FL. State inspectors ordered Funky Pelican on South Ocean Shore Boulevard shut down on June 18 after documenting rodent activity inside the beachside restaurant, the violation that triggered an immediate emergency closure order.
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation gave the restaurant until June 19 to vacate. Inspectors returned the following morning and cleared the facility at 8:17 a.m., allowing it to reopen.
What Inspectors Found
Funky Pelican: Recent Inspection History
The closure-triggering violation on June 18 was rodent activity, a finding state inspectors treat as an immediate threat to public health. The inspection that day also turned up four high-severity violations and three intermediate violations beyond the rodent finding itself.
That combination, rodent evidence plus multiple high-severity citations in a single visit, is what moves a case from a standard inspection write-up to an emergency shutdown order.
What This Means
Rodent activity in a food service facility is not a housekeeping citation. Rodents move through a kitchen at night, crossing food prep surfaces, contaminating stored ingredients, and leaving behind droppings and urine that can carry Salmonella, Leptospira, and Hantavirus, among other pathogens.
Unlike a temperature violation that affects a specific batch of food, rodent contamination is diffuse. Inspectors cannot identify precisely which surfaces were contacted, which ingredients were compromised, or how long the activity had been occurring before the inspection date.
That uncertainty is why the state treats confirmed rodent activity as grounds for immediate closure rather than a corrective action plan. Customers eating at the restaurant on June 17 or the morning of June 18, before the inspection, had no way of knowing rodents had been present in the facility.
The four additional high-severity violations documented on the same visit compound the concern. High-severity violations are the category reserved for findings with a direct route to customer illness, as opposed to the paperwork and labeling issues that populate the lower tiers.
The Pattern
The June 18 closure was not an isolated event in Funky Pelican's inspection record. The restaurant has been inspected 36 times and has accumulated 210 total violations across that history.
This is also the second emergency closure in the facility's record. The prior closure puts the June 18 shutdown in a different category than a first-time finding at an otherwise clean operation.
The inspection data from the past three years shows a consistent presence of high-severity violations. The December 2023 visit produced six high-severity and five intermediate violations. The August 2024 inspection turned up six high-severity and three intermediate violations. The February 2025 inspection was the worst single visit in the recent record, with eight high-severity violations and two intermediate violations.
September 2025 added three more high-severity violations. The restaurant then reached June 2026 with four high-severity violations and the rodent activity finding that closed it.
The two February 2024 inspections, conducted a week apart, both came back clean, with zero high-severity violations on each. That pair of results shows the facility is capable of passing inspection. It also means the violations documented in surrounding visits were not simply the product of a strict inspector or an unusual week.
The Longer Record
Thirty-six inspections and 210 violations over the life of the facility's record represent a substantial accumulation for a single restaurant. That average works out to roughly six violations per inspection across the full history.
The more telling number is the pattern of high-severity findings. In five of the seven most recent inspections with any violations at all, inspectors documented at least three high-severity citations. The February 2025 visit produced eight.
High-severity violations are the subset of findings that state inspectors flag as posing the most direct risk of customer illness. A facility that repeatedly generates them across multiple inspection cycles, with different inspectors and across different seasons, is not experiencing random bad luck.
The prior emergency closure in the facility's history means the June 18 shutdown was the second time the state determined that conditions at Funky Pelican posed an immediate enough threat to require customers be turned away at the door.
The restaurant cleared its follow-up inspection on the morning of June 19 and was permitted to reopen. Whether the conditions that produced 210 violations and two emergency closures over 36 inspections have been durably addressed is a question the next unannounced inspection will answer.