SANFORD, FL. Inspectors visiting Charley's Cheesesteaks Wings on South French Avenue on August 20 found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, meaning some of what the restaurant was serving that day had bypassed federal safety inspections entirely. The restaurant was not closed.
The August inspection turned up six high-severity violations and five intermediate ones, for a total of eleven citations. That is more than double the four violations recorded during the only prior inspection on file, conducted in March.
What Inspectors Found
The unapproved food source citation is among the most serious a restaurant can receive. When food enters a kitchen through channels outside USDA or FDA oversight, there is no paper trail. If a customer gets sick, investigators have no way to trace the ingredient back to its origin.
The restaurant also had no written employee health policy, or an inadequate one. That means there was no documented system to keep workers who are sick with Norovirus, Salmonella, or other transmissible illnesses out of the kitchen and away from food preparation.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for food in poor condition, mislabeled, or adulterated. Food contact surfaces, the cutting boards, prep tables, and any surface that touches what customers eat, were not properly cleaned or sanitized.
Two additional high-severity violations rounded out the list. The restaurant was not correctly using time as a public health control, a method that allows food to sit at room temperature for a defined window before it must be discarded. Without proper tracking, that window becomes undefined. There was also no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked items, leaving customers with no warning about the risk of eating food that has not reached a safe internal temperature.
The five intermediate violations compounded the picture. Multi-use utensils were not properly cleaned, the sanitizing solution or procedures were incorrect, cold holding equipment was inadequate, single-use items were being reused, and wiping cloths were being used improperly. Each of those failures, on its own, can spread contamination across a kitchen.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of unapproved food sourcing and no employee health policy is particularly concerning because the two failures reinforce each other. Food of unknown origin may already carry pathogens. If the worker handling that food is sick and there is no policy requiring them to report symptoms or stay home, the contamination risk compounds at every step between the supplier and the customer's plate.
The time-as-public-health-control violation is less visible to customers but equally serious. Restaurants that use time rather than temperature to keep food safe are required to document exactly when food was removed from refrigeration and when it must be thrown out. Without that documentation, inspectors, and the restaurant itself, have no way to know whether food has been sitting in the bacterial growth zone, between 41 and 135 degrees Fahrenheit, for minutes or hours.
Inadequate cold holding equipment, cited as an intermediate violation, amplifies every temperature-related risk on the list. If the equipment cannot maintain proper temperatures, every item stored in it is at risk, regardless of how carefully staff handle it otherwise.
The sanitizer failures tie the intermediate violations together. Improper sanitizer concentration means surfaces that appear clean are not. Bacterial biofilms can develop on improperly cleaned utensils within 24 hours, and those films are resistant to casual wiping. Combined with the improper use of wiping cloths, which can transfer bacteria from one surface to another rather than eliminating it, the kitchen had multiple overlapping contamination pathways active at the same time.
The Longer Record
Charley's Cheesesteaks Wings on South French Avenue has only two inspections on record. The first, in March 2026, produced four violations, all intermediate, none high-severity. The August inspection produced eleven violations, six of them high-severity. That is a significant deterioration in five months.
The facility has never been emergency-closed. With only two inspections on file, there is not enough history to establish a long-term pattern, but the trajectory between the two visits is steep. The March inspection found problems with procedures. The August inspection found problems with food sourcing, food condition, sanitation, and the basic infrastructure of food safety management.
Twenty-four total violations across two inspections, with the majority concentrated in the most recent visit, is a record that points toward acceleration rather than correction.
Open for Business
State inspectors documented six high-severity violations at the Sanford location on August 20. They did not order an emergency closure.
The restaurant on South French Avenue was serving customers when inspectors arrived. It was serving customers when inspectors left.
