NEW PORT RICHEY, FL. When state inspectors walked into Christina's Family Restaurant on Main Street on September 28, they found toxic substances improperly identified, stored, or used inside a kitchen that was also missing a written employee health policy, had food contact surfaces that weren't properly cleaned or sanitized, and lacked a person in charge performing their duties. The restaurant was not closed.
All six violations flagged that day were classified as high severity. A seventh violation, inadequate ventilation and lighting, was rated intermediate. After the inspection, Christina's continued serving customers.
What Inspectors Found
The toxic substances violation is the most immediately alarming entry on the list. Chemicals stored, labeled, or used incorrectly in a food preparation environment can contaminate dishes directly, without any warning to the person eating them.
The food contact surface violation compounds that risk. Cutting boards, prep tables, and utensils that are not properly cleaned and sanitized between uses carry bacteria from one food item to the next, including from raw proteins to ready-to-eat foods.
The person-in-charge violation underpins all the others. When no one in a kitchen is actively exercising managerial control, individual failures like improper handwashing or skipped sanitation steps tend to accumulate rather than get caught. Inspectors found all three conditions present on the same day.
The specialized process violation adds another layer. When facilities conduct processes like smoking, curing, reduced-oxygen packaging, or other non-standard food preparation, those processes require written procedures and precise controls. Without them, the margin for error that can produce dangerous food expands significantly.
What These Violations Mean
The absence of a written employee health policy is not a paperwork problem. Without a formal policy requiring sick employees to report symptoms and stay away from food preparation, a worker with Norovirus, Salmonella, or Hepatitis A can handle food for an entire shift without anyone having the authority to send them home. Norovirus alone accounts for an estimated 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and direct transmission from food workers is one of its primary routes.
Improper handwashing technique is a related failure, and it is more dangerous than no handwashing attempt at all, because it creates false assurance. Pathogens remain on hands even after a wash that misses the fingertips, between fingers, or cuts the rinse time short. At Christina's, inspectors found the technique itself was wrong, not just that workers skipped the sink.
Together, those two violations at Christina's describe a kitchen where a sick employee could prepare food, wash their hands in a way that left pathogens behind, use a surface that wasn't properly sanitized, and send a plate to a table with no procedural checkpoint in place to interrupt that chain.
The inadequate ventilation violation, rated intermediate, is less acute but not trivial. Grease-laden air, accumulated smoke, and poor lighting create conditions where contamination is harder to spot and where long-term air quality affects both workers and food.
The Longer Record
The September 28 inspection was not an aberration. Christina's Family Restaurant has 27 inspections on record and 195 total violations documented across its history. The six high-severity violations found in September mirror a nearly identical inspection from September 5, 2024, which also produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate.
The pattern holds across multiple years. Inspectors found four high-severity violations in March 2026, four in August 2025, and four in March 2023. The facility has never received an emergency closure order in any of those inspections.
Two inspections in late 2023, on December 18 and December 27, found zero and one high-severity violations respectively, a brief stretch that stands out against the surrounding record. Every other inspection in the dataset returned at least one high-severity violation, and most returned two or more.
The 2024 and 2026 September inspections are particularly notable in combination. The same violation count, the same severity distribution, two years apart. A facility reaching the same findings in the same month across consecutive years is not catching and correcting problems between visits.
Still Open
Six high-severity violations in a single inspection is the threshold that has triggered emergency closures at restaurants across Florida. At Ferg's Sports Bar in St. Petersburg, 42 violations including live roaches and rodent droppings led to an immediate shutdown. At Locale Market, a fly infestation and temperature violations closed the gourmet market on Valentine's Day.
Christina's Family Restaurant on Main Street had toxic substances improperly stored, food contact surfaces that were not properly sanitized, no written employee health policy, improper handwashing technique, a missing person in charge, and a failure to follow required procedures for specialized processes.
It remained open.
