ORLANDO, FL. Back in April 2026, a state inspector walked into Dustin's Bar B Q on East Colonial Drive and found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers sitting in a restaurant that had accumulated 211 violations across 24 inspections, and left it open.
The April 13 inspection produced six high-severity violations and two intermediate ones. The restaurant was not emergency-closed.
What Inspectors Found
The food sourcing violation was the most direct threat to anyone who ate there. When a restaurant cannot identify where its food came from, there is no way to trace an illness back to a supplier, no way to issue a recall, and no way to know whether the product passed federal inspection at all.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for inadequate shellfish traceability records. Shellfish, including oysters and clams, are among the highest-risk foods served in any restaurant because they are often eaten raw or only lightly cooked.
Two separate violations involved toxic chemicals, one for improper storage or labeling and one for improper identification, storage, or use. That is two distinct failures around the same category of risk, in the same inspection, on the same day.
Food contact surfaces were cited as not properly cleaned or sanitized, and multi-use utensils were flagged for the same failure. The restaurant also had no consumer advisory posted to warn customers about the risks of raw or undercooked food.
What These Violations Mean
Food from unapproved sources is not a paperwork problem. USDA and FDA inspection processes exist to screen for pathogens including Listeria and Salmonella before product reaches a kitchen. When a restaurant cannot document where its food originated, customers absorb that entire screening gap. If someone became ill after eating at Dustin's in April, investigators would have had no chain of custody to follow.
The shellfish traceability failure compounds that risk. Shellfish harvested from contaminated waters and served without proper tagging records have been the source of multistate Vibrio and norovirus outbreaks. Without harvest location tags and dealer records on file, there is no way to know whether the shellfish served at Dustin's in April came from an approved growing area.
The two chemical violations are a separate category of danger entirely. Cleaning compounds and sanitizers stored near food, or stored without proper labeling, can contaminate food through direct contact or mislabeled containers. Acute chemical poisoning from restaurant contamination is rare but documented, and the risk is highest when multiple chemical storage failures occur simultaneously, as they did here.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces and utensils allow bacterial biofilms to form. Those biofilms are resistant to routine cleaning and can transfer pathogens to every item prepared on the surface.
The Longer Record
The April 2026 inspection was not an outlier. It was the eighth consecutive inspection, stretching back to January 2023, in which Dustin's Bar B Q recorded at least four high-severity violations. In several of those visits, the count reached nine.
The most recent prior inspection, in December 2025, produced eight high-severity violations and four intermediate ones. The inspection before that, in March 2025, produced nine high and one intermediate. The two inspections in October 2024, conducted on back-to-back days, each produced eight or nine high-severity violations.
Across 24 inspections on record, the facility has accumulated 211 total violations and has never been emergency-closed.
The pattern across those inspections shows persistent failures in the same categories. High-severity violations have appeared in every documented inspection going back at least three years. The April 2026 count of six high-severity violations was actually lower than the eight or nine recorded in each of the four prior inspections.
Still Open
State inspectors documented food from an unknown source, two separate chemical storage failures, unsanitized food contact surfaces, missing shellfish records, no consumer advisory, and improperly cleaned utensils, all in a single visit to a restaurant with 211 violations on its record.
Dustin's Bar B Q on East Colonial Drive remained open after the April 13 inspection.