APOLLO BEACH, FL. State inspectors walked into E Sushi and Grill on US Highway 41 on May 13 and found food coming from sources that could not be verified as USDA or FDA approved, a violation that means no one, including the restaurant, can confirm where that food has been or what safety checks it passed before landing on a customer's plate.
That was one of six high-severity violations documented in a single visit. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The food-sourcing violation is particularly significant at a sushi restaurant, where raw fish is central to the menu. If the origin of that fish cannot be confirmed, neither can whether it was handled, stored, or processed under any federal safety standard.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant twice for chemical violations: toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled, and toxic substances were improperly identified, stored, or used. Two separate citations for chemical handling in a single visit means inspectors found more than one instance of chemicals in proximity to food or food-preparation areas.
Food contact surfaces, including cutting boards and prep equipment, were not properly cleaned or sanitized. That means surfaces that touched raw ingredients were transferring whatever was on them to the next item prepared on those same surfaces.
Employees were also observed using improper hand-washing technique. This is a different violation from skipping hand-washing entirely. It means workers went through the motions of washing their hands without removing the pathogens that hand-washing is designed to eliminate.
The restaurant also had no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked foods. At a sushi restaurant, that advisory is not a formality. It is the only warning that customers with compromised immune systems, pregnant women, the elderly, and young children have that the food they are ordering carries an elevated risk.
The seventh violation: single-use items were being reused. Items designed for one use and discarded were going back into service.
What These Violations Mean
Food from an unapproved or unknown source is one of the most serious violations a restaurant can receive, and it carries a specific weight at a raw-fish establishment. Federal inspection systems exist to catch Listeria, Salmonella, and other pathogens before fish reaches a kitchen. When that chain of custody is broken or unknown, there is no way to trace an illness back to a source if a customer gets sick.
The two chemical violations, taken together, describe a kitchen where cleaning agents or other toxic substances were not kept away from food or food-preparation areas and were not properly labeled. A mislabeled chemical can be mistaken for a food-safe product. A chemical stored near food can contaminate it without anyone noticing until someone is already ill.
Improperly sanitized food contact surfaces are among the most direct routes for bacterial transfer in a kitchen. At a restaurant serving raw seafood, a surface that was not properly cleaned after contact with raw fish and then used to prepare another dish creates a direct cross-contamination pathway.
The missing consumer advisory matters because it removes the only informed-consent mechanism the state requires for raw-food service. Customers at E Sushi and Grill on May 13 had no posted notice that their order might carry risk.
The Longer Record
E Sushi and Grill: Recent Inspection History
The May 13 inspection was not an outlier. It came eight days after a May 5 visit that produced nine high-severity violations and one intermediate, a worse single-visit total than the inspection that followed it. The restaurant has now recorded high-severity violations in every inspection on record going back to at least 2022.
Across 25 inspections on record, E Sushi and Grill has accumulated 324 total violations. Every inspection in the available history has included multiple high-severity citations, with totals ranging from four to ten high-severity violations per visit. The categories repeat: food handling, sanitation, chemical storage.
The restaurant was emergency-closed once before, in June 2022, for rodent and fly activity. It reopened three days later. The violations documented since that closure have continued without interruption.
On May 13, 2026, after a visit that produced six high-severity violations at a raw-seafood restaurant, including food from an unverifiable source and chemicals improperly stored near food, E Sushi and Grill was permitted to remain open and continue serving customers.