LARGO, FL. Back in February 2026, state inspectors ordered Umai Sushi on Missouri Avenue shut down after finding evidence of rodent activity inside the restaurant, the fifth time in the facility's documented history that inspectors had pulled its license to operate.
The closure was ordered on February 10. The restaurant was allowed to reopen later that same day.
What Inspectors Found
Umai Sushi Emergency Closures, 2018-2026
The February 10 inspection produced two high-severity violations and two intermediate violations. A follow-up inspection conducted the same day, once the restaurant had addressed the closure-triggering conditions, found one remaining high-severity violation and one intermediate violation.
The most recent inspection on record, from April 13, 2026, showed the restaurant had brought its high-severity count down to three, with three intermediate violations on one visit and zero high-severity citations on a same-day callback inspection.
That callback on April 13 still carried one intermediate violation: inadequate ventilation and lighting.
What These Violations Mean
Rodent activity is among the conditions that trigger an automatic emergency closure under Florida food safety rules, and for direct reasons. Rodents move through walls, under equipment, and across food-contact surfaces at night. They leave droppings, urine, and hair in areas where food is prepared and stored, all of which are vectors for salmonella, leptospirosis, and hantavirus. A customer eating at a restaurant with active rodent presence has no way of knowing what surfaces their food touched before it reached the table.
The inadequate ventilation citation found in the April follow-up carries a different but real risk. Poor ventilation allows grease-laden vapors to accumulate in cooking areas, raising the risk of fire. It also allows carbon monoxide, smoke, and steam to build up in spaces where employees work for hours at a time. Neither condition is cosmetic.
What makes the February closure significant is not the violations themselves in isolation. It is that inspectors had documented the same category of problem, rodent or roach activity serious enough to warrant a shutdown, four times before at the same address.
The Longer Record
Umai Sushi has 45 inspections on record and 427 total violations documented across that history. That volume, spread across a licensed permanent food service facility, is not typical.
The five emergency closures span eight years. The first two, in January 2018 and June 2019, were both triggered by roach activity. After a five-year gap with no closures on record, the restaurant was shut down again in November 2024, again for roaches. That November 2024 closure has no confirmed reopen date in state records.
Less than three weeks later, on December 8, 2025, inspectors returned and found conditions serious enough to close the restaurant again, this time for rodent activity. That inspection produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate violation. A same-day callback found one additional high-severity violation. The restaurant reopened December 8.
The February 10, 2026 closure came 64 days after that December shutdown.
The inspection data from the months surrounding the February closure shows a facility cycling through high-severity findings without sustained resolution. The January 2025 inspection found four high-severity and four intermediate violations. The November 2024 inspection found three high-severity and one intermediate. The pattern across eight inspections from late 2024 through early 2026 does not show a facility that resolved its most serious problems and maintained that improvement.
The December 2025 inspection, with six high-severity violations, was the heaviest single-visit citation count in the recent record provided. The February closure followed it in under ten weeks.
Where Things Stood After February
The restaurant was permitted to reopen on the afternoon of February 10 after addressing the immediate conditions that triggered the closure. State records show inspectors returned on April 13, 2026, and the facility cleared its callback inspection with zero high-severity violations on the second visit that day.
That April result is the most recent data point in the inspection record. Whether the improvement holds is not something the inspection record from February can answer.
What the record does show clearly is that Umai Sushi reached its fifth emergency closure in February 2026, with rodent activity documented as the cause on two of the last three shutdowns and roach activity on the two before that. The November 2024 closure, the one immediately preceding the two-closure stretch in December 2025 and February 2026, has no confirmed reopen date in state records.
