NEW PORT RICHEY, FL. State inspectors ordered Sam's New York Pizza on Little Road closed on August 24 after finding rodent activity inside the restaurant, the second time in the facility's documented history that inspectors have pulled the plug on the Pasco County pizza shop.
The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation gave the restaurant until August 25 to vacate. Records show the restaurant was cleared to reopen that same day, at 9:19 a.m., after a follow-up inspection.
What Inspectors Found
Sam's New York Pizza: Recent Inspection Pattern
The closure on August 24 was triggered by documented rodent activity, a finding inspectors treat as an immediate threat to public safety. That inspection produced five high-severity violations and three intermediate violations, the worst single-day tally the restaurant has recorded in recent years.
The follow-up visit the next morning found two high-severity violations still on the books. One of those was food not cooked to the required minimum temperature. The other was toxic chemicals improperly stored or labeled.
Neither of those two violations was the rodent finding itself. That the restaurant cleared the emergency threshold while still carrying two high-severity citations is a fact the record reflects without explanation.
What These Violations Mean
Rodent activity is one of the shortest routes to an emergency closure under Florida's food safety rules, and for a direct reason. Rodents move through a kitchen at night, across prep surfaces, inside equipment, and through stored food. They leave droppings and urine along every path they travel. A customer eating food prepared on a contaminated surface has no way of knowing it, and no menu item signals the difference.
The two violations that survived into the follow-up inspection carry their own risks. Food not cooked to minimum temperature is among the most documented causes of foodborne illness in the country. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. A pizza shop handling meat toppings that are not brought to safe internal temperatures sends that risk directly to the customer eating the slice.
Improperly stored or labeled toxic chemicals present a different category of danger. When cleaning agents, sanitizers, or pesticides are stored near food or in unlabeled containers, the contamination risk is acute. Mislabeled chemicals have been mistaken for food-safe products by employees. The consequences can include chemical poisoning, not foodborne illness, which means the cause is often harder to identify quickly.
Together, those three violation types, rodent activity, undercooked food, and chemical storage failures, represent three separate pathways by which a customer could be harmed. All three were present in a single inspection.
The Longer Record
Sam's New York Pizza has 23 inspections on record with the state and 115 total violations documented across that history. That volume places it well above what a routine inspection file looks like for a permanent food service establishment of its size and tenure.
This was not the restaurant's first emergency closure. State records show one prior emergency closure before the August 24 shutdown, meaning the restaurant has now been ordered closed by inspectors twice in its documented history. The data does not specify when the first closure occurred, but the pattern of high-severity violations in the years leading up to this one offers context.
In May 2025, inspectors cited four high-severity violations. In January 2025, two more. In April 2026, three high-severity violations and one intermediate were documented before the restaurant passed a clean inspection later that same month. The August 24 closure came roughly four months after that clean visit.
The two inspections in 2024, in April and May, produced zero high-severity violations each. That stretch of clean inspections makes the trajectory since then harder to explain as a steady decline. The violations have come in clusters, with clean visits in between, a pattern that suggests the restaurant has the capacity to meet state standards but has not held that standard consistently.
What the record does not show is a single sustained period of clean inspections long enough to suggest the underlying problems, whatever drives the recurring high-severity findings, have been resolved. The second emergency closure in the facility's history adds a data point that the first one did not by itself establish: this is not a one-time event.
Where Things Stand
The restaurant was cleared to reopen on the morning of August 25, less than 24 hours after inspectors shut it down. The speed of that turnaround is not unusual in Florida's inspection system, where emergency closures can be lifted as soon as a follow-up inspector determines the immediate threat has been addressed.
What the follow-up inspection record shows is that two high-severity violations, food temperature and chemical storage, remained at the time of clearance. Whether those were resolved during the follow-up visit or carried forward is not specified in the data.
The state's inspection file for Sam's New York Pizza now includes two emergency closures, 23 inspections, and 115 violations. The next routine inspection will determine whether the August findings produced any lasting change.
