MIAMI BEACH, FL. Inspectors visiting 11 Street Diner on Washington Avenue on July 15 found food coming from unapproved or unknown sources, meaning some of what was being served to customers had bypassed every federal safety checkpoint designed to catch Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli before it reaches a plate.
That was one of nine high-severity violations documented that day. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The full list reads like a catalogue of compounding failures. Inspectors cited inadequate handwashing facilities and improper handwashing technique as separate violations, meaning the physical infrastructure for hand hygiene was deficient and employees were not using it correctly even where it existed.
Parasite destruction procedures were not being followed. For a diner that serves fish or pork, that means the freezing or cooking steps required to kill Anisakis, tapeworm, and Trichinella were not being met. The menu lists no consumer advisory warning customers that some items may be raw or undercooked, a required disclosure that allows diners to make an informed choice about their own risk.
Toxic substances were improperly identified, stored, or used. That citation sits in the same inspection report as a finding of improper sewage or wastewater disposal, which carries its own risk of fecal contamination spreading through the facility.
The person in charge was either not present or not performing required supervisory duties.
What These Violations Mean
The food-from-unapproved-sources violation is the one that cuts off every other safety net. When food enters a kitchen through channels that have not been inspected or certified by the USDA or FDA, there is no traceability if a customer gets sick. Health investigators cannot identify the contaminated lot, cannot issue a recall, and cannot stop others from being exposed. It is the violation that makes every other food safety measure irrelevant for those particular ingredients.
The absence of a written employee health policy compounds the risk in a specific way. Without a formal policy requiring workers to report illness and stay out of the kitchen when symptomatic, a single employee sick with Norovirus can expose every customer served during that shift. Norovirus accounts for roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food workers are one of its primary transmission routes.
The handwashing violations, taken together, describe a kitchen where contamination can move freely. Studies show that proper handwashing reduces foodborne illness transmission by up to 50 percent. When the facilities are inadequate and the technique is wrong, that reduction disappears entirely.
Time as a public health control is a specific regulatory mechanism that allows food to stay in the temperature danger zone, between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit, for a defined window before it must be discarded. When that procedure is not properly followed, food that should have been thrown out stays in service. The mechanism that was supposed to substitute for temperature control fails, and customers eat food that has spent unknown time accumulating bacterial growth.
The Longer Record
11 Street Diner: Recent Inspection History
The July 15 inspection was not an outlier. State records show 31 inspections on file for the Washington Avenue location, with 310 total violations accumulated across that history. Every inspection in the past two years has produced multiple high-severity citations.
The January 2025 visit produced 7 high-severity violations. The August 2024 visits, two inspections conducted on the same date, produced 7 high-severity and 3 high-severity violations respectively. The September 2025 inspection found 6 high-severity violations. The pattern is not a restaurant that occasionally falls short and corrects course. It is a restaurant that has logged high-severity violations at every documented inspection across a span of years.
In none of those 31 inspections has the facility been emergency-closed. The July 15 inspection, with its nine high-severity findings including unapproved food sources, no health policy, improper sewage disposal, and mishandled toxic substances, did not change that.
As of the inspection date, 11 Street Diner on Washington Avenue remained open for business.
