NEW SMYRNA BEACH, FL. State inspectors found food from an unapproved or unknown source inside Grille at 1000 Wayne Ave. during an April 27 inspection, a violation that means some of what was being served that day had bypassed every federal safety checkpoint designed to catch Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli before it reaches a plate.
That was one of nine high-severity violations documented during the visit. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The nine high-severity violations span nearly every layer of food safety that regulators consider critical. Inspectors found no written employee health policy and documented that employees were not reporting illness symptoms, two separate citations that address the same gap: a sick worker can move from prep station to plate without any system to stop them.
Improper handwashing technique was also cited. That citation is distinct from having no sink or no soap. It means employees were washing their hands, but doing it wrong, leaving pathogens on their hands after the attempt.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled near food. Inspectors also noted that no allergen awareness was demonstrated by staff, a citation that matters acutely for the estimated 32 million Americans living with food allergies. There was no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked menu items. And the person in charge was either absent or not performing their duties.
The two intermediate violations, improperly cleaned multi-use utensils and improper use of wiping cloths, compounded the picture. Wiping cloths used incorrectly do not clean surfaces; they redistribute bacteria across them.
What These Violations Mean
The food-from-unapproved-sources citation is the one that can be hardest to walk back. When food enters a kitchen through a channel that bypasses USDA or FDA inspection, there is no paper trail. If a customer gets sick, investigators cannot trace the product to its origin, identify other affected locations, or issue a recall. That traceability gap is the reason approved sourcing requirements exist.
The illness-reporting cluster, three violations covering policy, practice, and reporting, describes a kitchen with no functioning barrier against a contagious employee. Norovirus, which causes roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, spreads most efficiently when a sick food worker has no reason, or no instruction, to stay home.
Food contact surfaces that are not properly cleaned and sanitized, combined with multi-use utensils that are not properly cleaned, means the tools and surfaces used to prepare food are carrying whatever was prepared before. The bacteria do not need a new source. They are already in the kitchen.
The chemicals citation is the most immediately dangerous in a different way. Mislabeled or improperly stored cleaning agents near food create conditions for acute poisoning, not the slow accumulation of risk associated with bacterial contamination, but immediate harm from a single exposure.
The Longer Record
The April 27 inspection was not an aberration. State records show Grille has been inspected 42 times and has accumulated 370 total violations across that history.
The six most recent inspections before April 27 all produced high-severity violations. The October 2025 visit yielded eight high-severity and three intermediate violations. The March 2025 visit produced nine high-severity and five intermediate violations. The July 2024 visits, conducted on consecutive days, produced eight high-severity violations on July 16 and four more on July 17.
The pattern across those visits is not a facility occasionally slipping. It is a facility that has logged nine high-severity violations in the same inspection cycle at least twice in the past three years, in March 2025 and again in April 2026.
The restaurant was emergency-closed once before, in October 2018, for rodent activity. Records show it reopened the same day. The violations that have accumulated since then have not triggered another closure.
The Facility Remained Open
Florida's emergency closure authority is triggered when an inspector determines that conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. After the April 27 inspection, with nine high-severity violations on record including unapproved food sources, absent managerial control, no illness reporting system, and improperly stored chemicals, the inspector did not make that determination.
Grille on Wayne Avenue was open for business when the inspector left.