HIALEAH, FL. A state inspector walked into Forno y Pasta at 1990 W 60th Street on July 15 and found food that had not been cooked to the required minimum temperature, employees with no system for reporting illness symptoms, and a person in charge who was either absent or not doing the job. The restaurant was cited for seven high-severity violations. It was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The temperature violation sits at the top of the list because the consequences are direct. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. If a dish left the kitchen undercooked on July 15, anyone who ate it absorbed that risk without knowing it.
Three of the seven violations form a cluster around employee illness. The restaurant had no written health policy, employees were not reporting illness symptoms, and there was no functioning management oversight to catch either problem. Those three conditions together describe a kitchen where a sick worker could prepare food for an entire shift with no mechanism to stop it.
Inspectors also documented improper handwashing technique, meaning employees were going through the motions of washing without removing pathogens. A handwashing attempt that leaves contamination on the hands is functionally the same as no handwashing at all.
The shellfish violation adds a separate layer of concern. Forno y Pasta's records for shell stock, covering oysters, clams, or mussels, were inadequate or missing. If a customer became ill after eating shellfish, there would be no reliable paper trail to trace the source. The restaurant also lacked a consumer advisory notifying customers that raw or undercooked items carry health risks, leaving elderly diners, pregnant women, and immunocompromised customers without the information they need to make an informed choice.
What These Violations Mean
The food temperature violation is not a paperwork problem. Undercooking is one of the leading documented causes of foodborne illness in the United States. Salmonella, which survives in poultry cooked below the required threshold, can cause severe gastrointestinal illness and, in vulnerable patients, hospitalization. A single undercooked serving is enough to make someone sick.
The illness-reporting failures carry a different kind of danger. Norovirus, which spreads through contaminated food handled by infected workers, accounts for roughly 20 million cases of illness in the United States annually. Without a written health policy and without employees trained to report symptoms, a worker who shows up sick at Forno y Pasta has no formal obligation to disclose that status and no manager enforcing a rule that does not exist on paper.
The person-in-charge violation ties the others together. CDC research shows that food service establishments without active managerial control accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of those with engaged supervision. At Forno y Pasta on July 15, the inspector found not one failure of oversight but seven.
The Longer Record
Forno y Pasta: Recent Inspection Pattern
The July 15 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Forno y Pasta has accumulated 174 violations across 25 inspections on record. Of the eight most recent inspections before this one, six produced high-severity violations. The only clean inspection in recent years was July 2024, when inspectors found zero high-severity citations. That result has not been repeated since.
The pattern of high-severity violations stretching back through 2023 and 2024 suggests the problems documented on July 15 are not new. A kitchen that has been cited for five high-severity violations in December 2024 and four more in July 2025 is not a kitchen that has been steadily improving.
Forno y Pasta has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history. The July 15 inspection, which produced the restaurant's worst single-visit high-severity count in the records reviewed, did not change that.
Seven high-severity violations. No intermediate violations. No closure order. The restaurant on West 60th Street remained open.
