APOLLO BEACH, FL. Inspectors visited Finn's Dockside Bar & Grill at 1112 Apollo Beach Blvd on May 1, 2026, and found that the waterfront restaurant had no written employee health policy, no system to trace the shellfish it was serving to customers, and toxic chemicals stored improperly near food. They documented nine high-severity violations and two intermediate ones. Then they left the restaurant open.
What Inspectors Found
The shellfish violation stands out at a dockside bar. Finn's serves raw and lightly cooked shellfish, the inspection record indicates, but inspectors found inadequate shell stock identification and records. That means if a customer became ill after eating oysters or clams, there would be no paper trail to identify where the shellfish came from, which harvest lot was involved, or how many other customers may have been exposed.
The toxic chemicals finding compounds the picture. Inspectors cited improper storage or labeling of chemicals near food, a violation that carries the risk of acute poisoning through direct contamination or mislabeling of containers that staff then handle near food preparation surfaces.
The management failure violation is listed first in the inspection record for a reason. Inspectors found that a person in charge was either not present or not performing supervisory duties. CDC data cited in the inspection record shows establishments without active managerial control accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of those with it. Every other violation on the list is, in part, a downstream consequence of that one.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and employees not reporting illness symptoms is the setup for a multi-victim outbreak. Without a written policy, workers have no formal instruction about when to stay home. Without a reporting requirement, a worker with Norovirus can spend an entire shift handling food. Norovirus is responsible for roughly 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year, and a single infected food handler is enough to sicken dozens of customers.
The shellfish traceability failure is a separate and acute risk. Shellfish harvested from contaminated waters and served raw or lightly cooked can transmit Vibrio, hepatitis A, and Norovirus. The identification tags and receiving records that inspectors found inadequate exist precisely so that a sick customer's meal can be traced back to a specific harvest location and date. Without those records, a public health investigation starts from zero.
The improper sewage or wastewater disposal violation, one of the two intermediate citations, adds a layer that is difficult to read charitably. Improper sewage handling creates the possibility of fecal contamination spreading through a facility, reaching food preparation surfaces, equipment, and the hands of workers who may not know the exposure occurred.
Taken together, the nine high-severity violations describe a kitchen where management oversight was absent, sick workers had no policy requiring them to disclose illness, the surfaces they worked on were not properly cleaned or sanitized, the chemicals stored nearby were not properly labeled, and the shellfish being served to customers could not be traced if someone got sick.
The Longer Record
The May 2026 inspection was the tenth on record for Finn's Dockside. Across those ten inspections, the facility has accumulated 122 total violations. That is not a facility with a bad week. That is a facility with a pattern.
The most recent prior inspection, on December 30, 2025, produced seven high-severity and three intermediate violations. The one before that, in April 2025, was comparatively light at three high-severity citations. But go back further and the picture sharpens: ten high-severity violations in November 2024, nine in March 2024 just ten days after another inspection that found five, eleven in October 2023, nine in March 2023, seven in January 2023.
In eight of the ten inspections on record, Finn's has logged at least seven high-severity violations. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The May 2026 inspection, with nine high-severity violations including no employee health policy, no shellfish traceability, improperly stored toxic chemicals, and no functioning management oversight, is not a departure from the record at Finn's Dockside. It is the record.
The restaurant was open for business when inspectors finished their report.