SEFFNER, FL. State inspectors ordered Martha's Family Restaurant Inc on East Highway 92 closed on July 15 after documenting roach and fly activity inside the Seffner dining room, the third time in two years that pest activity has forced the restaurant to shut its doors to customers.
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation issued the emergency closure order and directed the facility to vacate by July 16. The restaurant passed a follow-up inspection the same day and reopened at 8:34 that morning.
What Inspectors Found
Martha's Family Restaurant: Recent Inspection Pattern
The July 15 inspection produced six high-severity violations and five intermediate violations. Among the most serious: inspectors cited the restaurant for having no employee health policy, or an inadequate one, and for food contact surfaces that were not properly cleaned or sanitized.
The intermediate violations included improper sewage or wastewater disposal and multi-use utensils that were not properly cleaned. Those four violations carried over, in reduced form, to the follow-up inspection on July 16, when two high-severity and two intermediate violations still remained after the overnight corrective work.
What These Violations Mean
The roach and fly activity that triggered the closure is more than an aesthetic problem. Both insects travel between sewage, garbage and food preparation surfaces, transferring bacteria at each stop. A single fly landing on an open food item can deposit pathogens picked up from a drain or waste container moments earlier.
The employee health policy violation compounds that risk directly. Without a written policy requiring sick workers to stay home, a food handler with Norovirus can work an entire shift, touching food, utensils and surfaces. Norovirus accounts for roughly 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year, and a single infected food worker is enough to sicken dozens of customers in one service period.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces are a separate transmission route. Cutting boards, prep tables and similar surfaces that are not properly sanitized allow bacteria from one food item to transfer to the next, a process inspectors call cross-contamination. The improper sewage disposal citation adds a third pathway: raw sewage contains fecal bacteria that can spread throughout a facility if waste lines are not properly maintained or sealed.
Together, these violations describe a facility where multiple contamination pathways were open at the same time on the same day.
The Pattern
This was not the first time flies forced Martha's to close. On July 17, 2024, state inspectors shut the restaurant for fly activity. It reopened the following day after corrections were made.
That 2024 closure did not end the facility's inspection problems. Inspectors returned on August 25, 2025, and found two high-severity violations. A follow-up visit on September 2, 2025, produced two more high-severity citations. By February and March of 2026, inspections were turning up four high-severity violations per visit.
The July 15, 2026 closure arrived less than five months after that March inspection.
The Longer Record
Martha's Family Restaurant has accumulated 255 violations across 33 inspections on record, a total that spans multiple years of state oversight. That average works out to roughly 7.7 violations per inspection visit, a figure that places this location well above what a routine inspection typically surfaces.
The facility's two prior emergency closures, in July 2024 and now July 2026, both cite pest activity as the triggering cause. That is the same category of violation appearing two years apart at the same address, suggesting the underlying conditions that attract pests have not been resolved between closures.
The inspection record does include one clean visit: on November 26, 2024, inspectors found zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations. That inspection came roughly four months after the 2024 fly closure. By August 2025, high-severity violations had returned.
The two violations that remained on the July 16 follow-up reinspection, after the restaurant had completed its overnight corrective work and been cleared to reopen, are part of the public record for this address.
