RIVERVIEW, FL. Back in February 2026, state inspectors walked into Rotis Indian Restaurant on US Highway 301 and found what they had found there before: evidence of rodent activity serious enough to shut the place down.
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation ordered the restaurant at 13025 US Hwy 301 S closed on February 12, 2026. Customers had until February 14 to be vacated from the premises. It was the restaurant's second emergency closure in just over two months.
What Inspectors Found
Rotis Indian Restaurant: Recent Inspection Pattern
The February 12 inspection produced eight high-severity violations and four intermediate ones, the most serious inspection on record in the recent history of the restaurant. Rodent activity was the triggering violation, the condition inspectors determined posed an immediate threat to public health.
Inspectors also documented that single-use items were being improperly reused. Gloves, cups, utensils, or foil designed for a single use were being pressed back into service in the kitchen.
The restaurant reopened on February 14, though two high-severity violations and two intermediate violations remained on record at the time of the reopening inspection. A follow-up visit on February 24 showed the same count: two high-severity, two intermediate violations still documented.
What These Violations Mean
Rodent activity in a food service facility is not a housekeeping failure. It is a direct contamination pathway. Rodents move through walls, across prep surfaces, and into food storage areas, leaving droppings, urine, and hair on surfaces that contact the food customers eat. A single active rodent can contaminate far more food than it consumes. That is why the state treats confirmed rodent activity as grounds for immediate closure rather than a citation to be corrected at the next scheduled visit.
The reuse of single-use items carries a separate but compounding risk. Items like gloves, disposable cups, and single-use utensils are designed without the material durability to survive washing or sanitizing. When they are reused, they become vectors for cross-contamination, transferring bacteria from one food, surface, or handler to the next. In a kitchen already flagged for rodent activity, the combination means contamination risks were present at multiple points in the food preparation process.
The February 12 closure also came with eight high-severity violations total, not just the rodent finding. High-severity violations are the category the state reserves for conditions most directly linked to foodborne illness. Eight in a single inspection visit is a significant concentration.
The Pattern
The February 2026 closure was not the first time state inspectors had shut Rotis down for the same reason. On December 9, 2025, the restaurant was emergency-closed for rodent activity. It reopened the following day, December 10.
That means the restaurant was emergency-closed for rodent activity twice in 63 days.
The records go back further than that. Rotis has accumulated 274 violations across 32 inspections on record, an average of more than eight violations per inspection visit. The facility has now been emergency-closed a total of three times, each closure tied to rodent activity.
The Longer Record
Thirty-two inspections is a substantial history for any food service operation. For Rotis, that history shows a facility that has cycled through periods of improvement and regression without resolving the underlying conditions that keep drawing inspectors back.
The December 2025 closure should have been a turning point. The restaurant reopened within 24 hours, which is standard, but the February 12 inspection came just over two months later with eight high-severity violations, the highest single-inspection count in the recent record. Whatever corrective action followed the December closure did not prevent a second rodent-activity shutdown.
The April 15, 2026 inspection, conducted two months after the February closure, found six high-severity violations and five intermediate ones. That is not the profile of a facility that had fundamentally addressed the conditions underlying three emergency closures.
The most recent inspections on record, both conducted June 24, 2026, each showed zero high-severity violations and one intermediate violation. That is the cleanest the record has looked in months.
Whether that improvement holds, and whether it reflects the kind of structural change that the prior three closures failed to produce, is a question the inspection record alone cannot answer.