ORLANDO, FL. A state inspector walked into Caravan on South Orange Avenue on May 19 and found food from unapproved or unknown sources, a violation that means the restaurant was serving ingredients with no traceable safety inspection behind them.
That was one of eight high-severity violations documented that day. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The full list of high-severity violations reads like a checklist of the conditions most likely to make customers sick. No written employee health policy. Employees not reporting illness symptoms. Improper handwashing technique. Toxic chemicals improperly stored or labeled. No consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods. No demonstrated allergen awareness. And no person in charge present or performing supervisory duties.
The two intermediate violations were single-use items being improperly reused and inadequate ventilation and lighting.
What These Violations Mean
The food sourcing violation is the one with the longest shadow. When a restaurant receives food from unapproved or unknown sources, that food has bypassed USDA and FDA inspection systems. If someone gets sick, investigators have no chain of custody to trace. Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli can all enter a kitchen through uninspected product, and no one would know where to start looking.
The illness reporting failures compound that risk directly. Caravan was cited for having no written employee health policy and for employees not reporting symptoms of illness. Those two violations together mean that a sick worker had no formal obligation to stay home and no documented process requiring them to disclose symptoms to management. Norovirus, which causes roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, spreads most efficiently through exactly this pathway: an infected food handler who keeps working.
The handwashing violation adds another layer. Improper technique, even when an employee attempts to wash their hands, leaves pathogens on skin. Combined with no active manager on site, there was no one positioned to catch or correct the failure in the moment.
The allergen violation is its own category of risk. Thirty-two million Americans have food allergies. Allergic reactions send roughly 30,000 people to emergency rooms annually and cause deaths. When staff cannot demonstrate allergen awareness, customers with severe allergies have no reliable way to assess whether a dish is safe for them.
The Longer Record
The May 19 inspection was not an outlier. It was the continuation of a pattern that state records show stretching back well over a year.
Inspectors visited Caravan on March 17, 2026, and found 8 high-severity and 2 intermediate violations. The visit the day before, March 16, produced 8 high-severity and 3 intermediate violations. The January 8, 2026 inspection: 8 high, 3 intermediate. December 4, 2025: 8 high, 3 intermediate. September 24, 2025: 9 high, 3 intermediate.
That is five consecutive inspections, spanning roughly eight months, each producing eight or nine high-severity violations.
The facility has 29 inspections on record and 296 total violations documented across that history. It has never been emergency-closed.
The two inspections that broke the pattern, in some sense, were from April and May of 2025, when violation counts dropped to 6 high and 2 high respectively. But by the fall of 2025, the count was back to 9 high in a single visit, and it has held near that ceiling ever since.
The Pattern
What makes the record at Caravan notable is not just the volume of violations but the consistency of the specific categories. The same clusters, management failures, illness policy gaps, food sourcing problems, appear across inspection after inspection. That is not a restaurant that slips occasionally. That is a restaurant where the conditions producing those violations have not been corrected between visits.
CDC research has found that establishments without active managerial control accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of those with engaged supervision. The person-in-charge violation at Caravan was cited again on May 19, the same category that appeared in prior inspections. Without someone in the building whose job is to catch these failures in real time, the other violations become predictable.
The facility has accumulated 296 documented violations across 29 inspections and has never received an emergency closure order.
On May 19, 2026, after an inspector documented food from an unknown source, no illness reporting system, improper handwashing, unlabeled chemicals, and no one in charge, Caravan on South Orange Avenue stayed open.