PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FL. State inspectors ordered Nona Blue on Front Street shut down on April 20 after finding live roach activity inside the restaurant, triggering an emergency closure that gave the business until April 23 to correct the problem before reopening.
It was not the first time. Records show this is the second emergency closure in Nona Blue's inspection history.
What Inspectors Found
Nona Blue: Recent Inspection Snapshot
The April 20 inspection that triggered the closure documented two high-severity violations and two intermediate violations. Roach activity was the cited reason for the emergency order. The restaurant was given until April 23 to address the conditions, and a follow-up inspection that day confirmed the closure conditions had been resolved. Nona Blue reopened at 12:55 p.m. on April 23.
The April 21 inspection, conducted while the restaurant was still under the closure order, found one intermediate violation remaining but no high-severity issues.
What This Means
Roach activity is among the violations state inspectors treat as grounds for immediate shutdown because cockroaches are direct carriers of pathogens including Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. They move freely between sewage, garbage, and food preparation surfaces, contaminating anything they contact. A single live roach in a kitchen is not a cosmetic problem. It indicates an established presence, because cockroaches are nocturnal and largely stay hidden when conditions allow it.
When inspectors document roach activity during a daytime visit, the infestation is typically large enough that insects are moving in the open. That is why Florida regulators treat the finding as an emergency rather than a standard citation requiring correction at the next routine inspection.
For customers who ate at Nona Blue in the days before the April 20 closure, the roach activity documented that day was not a new development. Infestations do not appear overnight. The exposure window is impossible to determine from inspection records alone, but the roaches present on April 20 were almost certainly present before inspectors arrived.
The Pattern
The April 20 closure did not come out of nowhere. The six months before it produced consistent findings of high-severity violations.
Inspectors cited two high-severity violations at Nona Blue in November 2025. Before that, the April 2025 inspection turned up six high-severity violations and one intermediate, the worst single-visit total in recent records. The October 2024 inspection matched it exactly: six high-severity violations, one intermediate.
That means across four consecutive inspections from October 2024 through April 2026, Nona Blue accumulated 16 high-severity violations. The February 2024 inspection, by contrast, found zero violations of any kind. Whatever changed between February and October 2024 produced a sustained deterioration that the April 20 closure represents as its most visible outcome.
The Longer Record
Nona Blue has been inspected 28 times and has accumulated 148 total violations across its history as a licensed permanent food service operation. That is an average of more than five violations per inspection visit.
This is the restaurant's second emergency closure on record. The existence of a prior closure matters because it means state regulators had already determined once before that conditions at this address posed an immediate risk to the public, serious enough to order the restaurant vacated. A facility that has been through an emergency closure once has been through the process: the shutdown, the corrective action, the follow-up inspection. The second closure suggests the corrective measures from the first did not produce lasting change.
The two inspections with six high-severity violations each, in October 2024 and April 2025, are the sharpest data points in that history. Six high-severity findings in a single visit is a significant number for any facility. Back-to-back inspections at that level, separated by roughly five months, indicate the underlying conditions driving those violations were not corrected between visits.
Nona Blue passed its follow-up inspection on April 23 and has reopened. Whether the conditions that produced this closure, and the pattern of high-severity findings that preceded it, have been genuinely addressed will be visible in the next routine inspection. That visit is not yet on record.