PALMETTO BAY, FL. An employee at El Tamalazo Sport Bar on South Dixie Highway was not reporting symptoms of illness during a June 15 state inspection, a violation inspectors classify as one of the leading causes of multi-victim foodborne outbreaks. The bar was not closed.
State inspectors documented seven high-severity violations and three intermediate violations during that single visit to the 17579 S Dixie Hwy location. Under Florida food safety rules, high-severity violations are those most directly linked to foodborne illness. El Tamalazo collected seven of them in one afternoon and remained open for business.
What Inspectors Found
The illness-reporting failure was not the only violation directly tied to customer safety. Inspectors also cited the bar for serving food from an unapproved or unknown source, meaning some of what customers ate that day bypassed federal inspection entirely.
Food was also not being cooked to required minimum temperatures, and inspectors found that employees were not washing their hands and arms correctly. That last violation is distinct from not washing hands at all: even when employees made an attempt, the technique was inadequate to remove pathogens.
Two separate chemical violations rounded out the high-severity list. Toxic chemicals were improperly stored or labeled, and toxic substances were improperly identified, stored, or used. Both were cited as creating immediate risk of chemical contamination in a food environment. The bar also lacked a required consumer advisory for any raw or undercooked items on its menu.
On the intermediate level, inspectors cited the bar for multi-use utensils that were not properly cleaned, inadequate cooling and cold-holding equipment, and insufficient ventilation and lighting in the kitchen.
What These Violations Mean
The illness-reporting failure is the violation public health officials consistently rank as the most dangerous in a food service setting. When a worker with norovirus, Salmonella, or hepatitis A continues handling food without reporting symptoms, every plate that leaves the kitchen becomes a potential transmission vehicle. A single infected food handler has caused outbreaks sickening dozens of customers at a time.
The food sourcing violation compounds that risk in a different direction. Food from unapproved sources has not been inspected by USDA or FDA-certified facilities. If a customer gets sick, there is no supply chain to trace, no lot number to recall, and no way to determine whether other customers were exposed to the same contaminated batch. It is the violation that most directly obstructs outbreak investigation.
Undercooking is the mechanism that allows pathogens to survive to the plate. Salmonella in poultry requires an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit to be destroyed. Food that does not reach that threshold can carry live bacteria to the customer, and the bar's inadequate cold-holding equipment means food that should have been kept cold was also at risk of entering the bacterial growth zone between 41 and 135 degrees.
The two chemical violations together suggest a kitchen where cleaning and sanitizing products were not properly separated or labeled from food and food-contact surfaces. Acute chemical poisoning from cross-contamination with improperly stored cleaning agents is rare but not unknown, and the risk is highest when storage and labeling failures occur simultaneously, as they did here.
The Longer Record
The June 15 inspection was not an aberration. State records show 23 inspections on file for El Tamalazo Sport Bar, with 243 total violations documented across those visits.
The most recent prior inspections tell a consistent story. Inspectors found six high-severity violations in September 2025, four more in November 2025, and four again in January 2025. Going further back, a May 2024 inspection produced 12 high-severity violations in a single visit, the highest single-inspection count in the available history. A 2023 visit logged nine high-severity violations, and another in March 2023 documented seven, matching this month's total exactly.
Only one inspection in the past three years came back clean on high-severity violations: a January 2024 visit that found a single intermediate citation. Every other inspection in that window found between four and twelve high-severity violations.
The bar has never been emergency-closed despite this record. Across 23 inspections and 243 documented violations, state regulators have not once ordered El Tamalazo to shut its doors.
Still Open
On June 15, 2026, with an employee showing illness symptoms that went unreported, with food arriving from an unverified source, with cooking temperatures falling short of the minimums required to kill Salmonella, and with toxic chemicals stored improperly alongside food, El Tamalazo Sport Bar on South Dixie Highway in Palmetto Bay remained open.
It was the bar's seventh inspection in roughly eighteen months to produce high-severity violations. The doors stayed open after all seven.