PEMBROKE PINES, FL. State inspectors walked into Cibao Dominican Restaurant LLC on North Palm Avenue on August 25 and found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, shellfish with no identification records, food contact surfaces that had not been properly cleaned or sanitized, and a menu serving raw or undercooked items with no advisory warning customers of the risk. They documented six high-severity violations and one intermediate violation. Then they left the restaurant open.
What Inspectors Found
The food sourcing violation is the one that anchors everything else. When a restaurant cannot document where its food came from, there is no supply chain to trace if a customer gets sick. No lot number, no distributor record, no way to connect an illness to a source.
The shellfish finding compounds that problem. Oysters, clams, and mussels are frequently eaten raw or barely cooked, and they filter water as they grow, concentrating whatever pathogens were present in that water. State law requires restaurants to keep the original harvest tags from every bag of shellstock, identifying the harvest location and date. Without those records, there is no way to determine whether shellfish served at Cibao came from a certified, tested source.
Food contact surfaces that had not been properly cleaned or sanitized were also cited. Cutting boards, prep tables, and similar surfaces that touch raw proteins and then touch ready-to-eat food without adequate cleaning between uses are one of the most direct routes for bacterial transfer in a commercial kitchen.
The time-as-public-health-control violation means the restaurant was using time, rather than refrigeration, to keep certain foods safe during service. That is a permitted practice under state code, but it requires strict documentation: the food must be labeled with a discard time, and it must be thrown out when that time expires. Inspectors found the system was not being properly followed.
The menu included raw or undercooked items, and there was no consumer advisory posted to warn customers. That advisory is not a formality. It is the only mechanism by which a customer with a compromised immune system, a pregnant woman, or an elderly diner can make an informed choice about what they order.
What These Violations Mean
Food from unapproved sources is the violation that most directly strips away the safety net built into the food supply system. USDA and FDA inspections at the source, at the processor, and at the distributor exist to catch contamination before it reaches a plate. When that chain is bypassed, the restaurant becomes the last and only checkpoint, and there is no documentation to fall back on if someone gets sick.
The combination of unapproved sourcing and inadequate shellfish records is particularly acute. Shellfish-related illnesses, including Vibrio and norovirus, can be severe and can be traced only when harvest tags are on file. At Cibao, inspectors found neither the sourcing documentation nor the shellfish records needed to support that tracing.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces and multi-use utensils that had not been properly cleaned create overlapping contamination pathways. Bacterial biofilms can establish on utensil surfaces within 24 hours and resist standard cleaning once formed. At a restaurant already cited for sourcing and food condition problems, unsanitized surfaces mean contamination introduced at one stage of prep can move forward through every subsequent stage.
The time control failure means food that was supposed to be discarded at a set hour may not have been. There is no temperature log to substitute for that record. The food either sat in the danger zone past its safe window, or there is no way to determine whether it did.
The Longer Record
The August 25 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Cibao has accumulated 269 violations across 36 inspections on record, a history that stretches back years and includes repeated high-severity citations.
The December 2025 inspection produced five high-severity violations and two intermediate violations, the closest prior comparison to this week's findings. Before that, a February 2025 inspection found three high-severity violations. The restaurant passed two consecutive inspections in early February 2026, with zero high or intermediate violations recorded on both February 4 and February 10, but a separate February 4 inspection that same week found one high and two intermediate violations.
The pattern is not one of a restaurant that struggled early and improved. It is a record of recurring high-severity findings separated by clean inspections, with the most serious violations reappearing across multiple years. The August 2026 inspection, with six high-severity citations, is the worst single inspection in the recent history visible in the data.
Cibao has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history. After six high-severity violations documented on August 25, 2026, it was not closed this time either.
