WILTON MANORS, FL. State inspectors ordered Tee Jay Thai Sushi on Wilton Drive closed on June 17 after documenting active rodent activity inside the restaurant, giving the owner until June 18 to vacate the premises.
The closure was not the restaurant's first. State records show it is the second emergency shutdown in the facility's history, and it comes against a backdrop of 244 total violations accumulated across 32 inspections on record.
What Inspectors Found
Tee Jay Thai Sushi: Recent Inspection Pattern
The June 17 inspection that triggered the closure found two high-severity violations and three intermediate violations. The specific trigger was rodent activity, which inspectors considered serious enough to require the restaurant to stop serving customers immediately.
A follow-up inspection the next morning, June 18, found zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations, and the restaurant was cleared to reopen at 10:21 a.m.
That clearance did not hold as the final word. A third inspection on June 22 found a high-severity violation for food not cooked to the required minimum temperature, along with an intermediate violation for multi-use utensils not properly cleaned.
The Violations
The June 22 high-severity finding is one of the most straightforward and dangerous failures an inspector can document. Food that does not reach minimum required cooking temperatures can carry live pathogens to the customer's plate.
Salmonella in poultry, for example, survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. A restaurant serving Thai food and sushi handles both poultry and raw fish, two categories where temperature control is not optional. When a kitchen fails to hit required minimums, the food reaching the table is not safe by any measurable standard.
The intermediate violation from the same June 22 visit, improperly cleaned multi-use utensils, compounds that risk. Utensils that are not thoroughly cleaned develop bacterial biofilms within 24 hours. Those biofilms are resistant to standard cleaning once established, meaning contamination can transfer from one food item to the next across multiple service periods.
What These Violations Mean
Rodent activity in a food service facility is treated by Florida regulators as an emergency condition, not a routine citation, for a specific reason. Rodents carry pathogens including Salmonella and Hantavirus, and they contaminate surfaces, food storage areas, and food contact equipment through droppings, urine, and direct contact. A customer cannot see that contamination on a plate.
The emergency closure authority exists precisely because the risk is not theoretical. When inspectors document active rodent activity, they have evidence that contamination of food or food-contact surfaces is occurring or has occurred. Ordering a restaurant vacated is the mechanism for stopping that exposure before someone gets sick.
The cooking temperature violation documented five days after reopening points to a separate but equally direct risk. A kitchen that is not consistently hitting required internal temperatures is producing food that may carry live bacterial loads. For a restaurant handling raw fish alongside cooked proteins, that is not a margin-of-error problem. It is a pathogen delivery problem.
The Longer Record
Thirty-two inspections and 244 total violations place Tee Jay Thai Sushi in a category that goes beyond an isolated bad day. The June 17 closure was the second emergency shutdown in the restaurant's documented history, meaning inspectors have now twice concluded that conditions inside the facility posed an immediate enough risk to require customers to stop entering.
The October 2025 inspection is worth isolating. Five high-severity violations in a single visit is a significant finding, and it came eight months before the June 2026 closure. High-severity violations in Florida's inspection system represent the category most directly tied to foodborne illness risk, covering issues like improper temperatures, contamination, and food from unapproved sources. Five in one inspection visit, followed by continued high-severity findings through the first half of 2026, describes a facility that has not resolved its most serious problems between visits.
The pattern across 2025 and into 2026 shows high-severity violations documented in every inspection period on record for that stretch, including two separate inspections in both March 2025 and July 2025. None of those visits produced a closure order. The June 2026 visit did.
As of the June 22 inspection, five days after the facility was cleared to reopen, a high-severity violation for undercooked food remained on the record.