PARKLAND, FL. A state inspector walked into Dear Olivia on North University Drive on September 18 and found food sourced from suppliers that had bypassed federal safety inspections, food not cooked to required minimum temperatures, and no written policy requiring sick employees to report their symptoms. The restaurant was not closed.
The inspection turned up six high-severity violations and one intermediate violation. Under Florida's inspection system, high-severity violations are those most directly linked to foodborne illness outbreaks.
What Inspectors Found
The unapproved food source violation is among the most serious an inspector can cite. Food that moves through approved suppliers is traceable: if someone gets sick, investigators can follow the supply chain back to the source. Food from unknown or unapproved sources has no such trail, and it has not been inspected by USDA or FDA screeners who look for Listeria, Salmonella, and other pathogens before product reaches a kitchen.
The undercooked food violation compounds that risk. Salmonella in poultry, for example, survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. When food arrives from an uninspected source and is then served undercooked, the two violations stack into a single exposure pathway with no safety checkpoint between the supplier and the customer's plate.
The inspector also documented that no person in charge was present or performing their duties during the visit. State inspection data consistently links the absence of active managerial control to higher rates of critical violations across a facility.
The Illness Risk Behind the Policy Violations
Three of the six high-severity violations at Dear Olivia on September 18 were directly tied to how the restaurant handles sick employees.
The inspector found no written employee health policy, documented that employees were not reporting illness symptoms, and cited improper handwashing technique. Those three violations, taken together, describe a kitchen where a worker with Norovirus could prepare food without anyone requiring them to stay home, without anyone checking whether they disclosed their symptoms, and without effective handwashing to interrupt transmission even if they tried.
Norovirus accounts for roughly 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year. It spreads primarily through infected food handlers. A written health policy is the mechanism that keeps symptomatic workers out of a kitchen before an outbreak begins.
The intermediate violation, improperly reused single-use items, adds a separate contamination pathway. Items like gloves, foil, and single-use utensils are designed for one use because reusing them transfers whatever contamination accumulated during the first use onto the next surface or food item they contact.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of violations documented at Dear Olivia on September 18 is not a random cluster. They describe a kitchen operating without the foundational controls that food safety systems depend on.
Food from unapproved sources removes the inspection layer that exists specifically to catch contaminated product before it enters a restaurant. Undercooked food removes the heat-kill step that serves as the last line of defense against pathogens that survived earlier in the supply chain. No employee health policy and no symptom-reporting remove the human surveillance layer that catches sick workers before they handle food. Improper handwashing removes the most basic physical barrier between a contaminated hand and a customer's meal.
Each of those controls exists because removing any one of them has, historically, produced outbreaks. At Dear Olivia on September 18, inspectors documented that all of them were absent or compromised simultaneously.
The Longer Record
The September 18 inspection was not an aberration. State records show 25 inspections on file for Dear Olivia, with 145 total violations accumulated across that history.
The pattern in the prior inspection record is consistent. The March 2026 inspection, six months before this one, produced seven high-severity violations and one intermediate, a worse tally than September's six. The August 2025 inspection produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate, a count nearly identical to September's. The June 2023 inspection produced five high-severity violations and one intermediate.
The only clean inspection in the recent record was August 2, 2023, which produced zero violations. Every other inspection in the data shows at least two high-severity violations, and most show four or more.
Dear Olivia has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history on record. The September 18 inspection, which documented food from unapproved sources, undercooked food, no illness reporting policy, and no manager on duty, did not change that.
The restaurant remained open after inspectors left.
