MIAMI, FL. A state inspector visited Bistro Café at 1352 NE 1 Avenue on June 18, 2026, and documented six high-severity violations, including food not cooked to required minimum temperatures and an employee who had not reported symptoms of illness. The restaurant was not closed.
Not a single intermediate violation appeared on the inspection report. Every one of the six citations was high-severity, the category Florida reserves for violations with the most direct potential to cause foodborne illness.
What Inspectors Found
The undercooking violation is among the most direct paths to a customer getting sick. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and inspectors cited the café for failing to reach required minimum temperatures.
An employee at the café had not reported symptoms of illness, a separate high-severity citation. Florida food safety rules require workers to disclose symptoms before they handle food, precisely because sick employees are the leading cause of multi-victim outbreaks.
Inspectors also cited the café for inadequate shell stock identification and records. Shellfish, including oysters, clams, and mussels, are frequently consumed raw or lightly cooked, and without proper tagging and sourcing records, there is no way to trace a contaminated batch if customers fall ill.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized. Cutting boards, prep tables, and other surfaces that touch raw food are primary vehicles for bacterial transfer, and a failure to sanitize them correctly means contamination can move from one ingredient to the next.
Employees were also documented using improper handwashing technique. Washing hands incorrectly leaves pathogens on skin even when a worker believes they have washed. Combined with the illness-reporting failure, the café had two separate breakdowns in the most basic line of defense between sick workers and the food on a customer's plate.
The sixth violation involved specialized food processes. Techniques like smoking, curing, fermenting, or reduced-oxygen packaging require precise controls because they create conditions where dangerous bacteria can thrive if the process is not followed exactly.
What These Violations Mean
The undercooking and illness-reporting violations together describe a specific scenario that food safety regulators treat as high-alert. A worker with symptoms of a gastrointestinal illness, handling food that is then served below the temperature required to kill pathogens, is a documented pathway to a norovirus or Salmonella outbreak affecting multiple diners at once.
The shellfish traceability failure adds a second layer of risk. If a customer became ill after eating oysters or clams at Bistro Café, investigators would have no reliable records to determine where the shellfish came from, which harvest bed they originated in, or whether other restaurants received product from the same contaminated source. Traceability is not a paperwork formality. It is the mechanism that stops an outbreak from spreading beyond one restaurant.
Improperly sanitized food contact surfaces compound every other violation on the list. A cutting board that has touched raw poultry and has not been properly cleaned becomes a transfer point. Food that is later placed on that surface, even food that will be served without further cooking, picks up whatever was left behind.
The improper handwashing technique citation closes a loop that runs through the entire inspection report. Undercooking, sick workers, contaminated surfaces, and now hands that were washed incorrectly: each violation reinforces the others. None of them is isolated.
The Longer Record
The June 2026 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Bistro Café has been inspected 22 times and has accumulated 122 total violations across its history. The café has never been emergency-closed.
The pattern of high-severity violations stretches back years. In September 2023, a single inspection produced nine high-severity citations and two intermediate ones. That was followed by four high-severity violations in March 2023, four more in November 2022, and four more in June 2024. The October 2025 inspection, eight months before this one, found four high-severity violations with no intermediate citations.
Six of the last eight inspections on record produced at least four high-severity violations each. The café has not had a clean high-severity record in any of the inspections documented in that span.
The facility has never triggered an emergency closure order despite this accumulation. Emergency closures in Florida are issued when an inspector determines that conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. Bistro Café has not met that threshold on any of its 22 inspections, including the most recent one.
Still Open
As of the June 18, 2026 inspection, Bistro Café remained open for business. Six high-severity violations, including undercooking, an unreported sick employee, and no traceability records for raw shellfish, were not enough to prompt a closure order.
The 122 violations accumulated across 22 inspections now include this report.