MIAMI, FL. Back in February 2026, state inspectors walked into Original Junie's Rest The on NW 2nd Avenue and found what they had found there before: evidence of rodent activity serious enough to shut the restaurant down.
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation ordered the restaurant at 18400 NW 2nd Ave closed on February 23, 2026. Inspectors gave the operator until February 25 to correct the conditions. The restaurant reopened that same day.
It was not the first time.
What Inspectors Found
Original Junie's: Emergency Closure History
The rodent finding on February 23 was the stated trigger for the emergency order. State inspectors have the authority to close a food service establishment immediately when active pest activity poses a direct threat to public health, and rodent activity meets that threshold on its own.
The February 23 inspection also documented two high-severity violations alongside the closure-triggering finding. The full picture of what inspectors found at the restaurant emerged more clearly in the follow-up visit on April 28, 2026, which recorded five high-severity violations with no intermediate violations.
The Violations
The April 28 inspection turned up five high-priority citations, each representing a distinct pathway to customer harm.
Inspectors cited an employee for not reporting symptoms of illness. They also found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers.
Food contact surfaces were documented as not properly cleaned or sanitized. Inspectors also found food not cooked to required minimum internal temperatures.
The fifth high-severity citation involved toxic substances improperly identified, stored, or used on the premises.
Five high-severity violations in a single inspection, at a facility that had just reopened from an emergency rodent closure two months earlier.
What These Violations Mean
Rodent activity in a restaurant is not a paperwork problem. Rodents carry Salmonella, Leptospira, and Hantavirus, and they contaminate food and food-contact surfaces through droppings, urine, and direct contact. When inspectors find evidence of rodent activity in a kitchen, every surface in that kitchen is a potential exposure point for every customer who ate there before the closure.
The failure to report illness symptoms, cited in the April 28 inspection, is among the most direct routes to a multi-victim outbreak. A food worker sick with norovirus or Salmonella who continues handling food can infect dozens of customers in a single shift. The violation does not require that a worker was visibly ill during the inspection. It means the system that is supposed to catch that worker before they reach the food line was not in place.
Food from unapproved or unknown sources, also cited on April 28, means that some of what Original Junie's served could not be traced back through a regulated supply chain. If a customer got sick, investigators would have no way to identify the source or pull the product.
Undercooking is a direct survival mechanism for pathogens. Salmonella in poultry requires an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit to be destroyed. Food not reaching that threshold means the bacteria that were present when the food went into the oven may still be present when it reaches the table. Improperly cleaned food-contact surfaces then carry those pathogens from one preparation cycle to the next.
Toxic substances improperly stored alongside food or in unlabeled containers create a separate and immediate risk: chemical contamination that produces symptoms within minutes of ingestion and has nothing to do with bacteria.
The Longer Record
Original Junie's has accumulated 381 violations across 40 inspections on record. That averages to more than nine violations per inspection visit over the life of the facility's documented history.
The February 2026 closure was the third time the restaurant had been emergency-closed for rodent activity. The first two closures came within two months of each other in 2018: an April shutdown for both roach and rodent activity, followed by a June shutdown for rodent activity alone. Both times, the restaurant reopened within two days.
The inspections in the fourteen months before the February 2026 closure showed no improvement. The February 2025 inspection found five high-severity violations. The September 2025 inspection found four high-severity violations. The February 23 closure came five months after that September visit.
Every inspection from February 2025 through April 2026 found at least two high-severity violations. The restaurant has now been emergency-closed three times for the same category of violation, rodent activity, across an eight-year span. The April 28, 2026 inspection, the most recent on record, found five high-severity violations at a facility that had reopened from its latest rodent closure just over two months before.