LAUDERHILL, FL. Inspectors visiting Jamaica House Restaurant II on West Broward Boulevard on September 17 found that employees were not following parasite destruction procedures for fish on the menu, a violation that means customers could have been served fish harboring live parasites, including Anisakis roundworm or tapeworm larvae.
That was one of seven high-severity violations documented in a single visit. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The shellfish traceability violation compounded the parasite concern. Inspectors cited inadequate shell stock identification records, meaning there was no documentation to trace where the restaurant's shellfish, oysters, clams, or mussels, came from. If a customer became sick after eating shellfish, there would be no records to identify the source or pull contaminated product from the supply chain.
Inspectors also found that employees were not reporting symptoms of illness, a separate high-severity citation. A food worker who continues working through a gastrointestinal illness can transmit norovirus to dozens of customers before any outbreak is detected.
Two distinct handwashing violations were cited on the same visit: employees were not washing hands adequately, and those who did attempt to wash were using improper technique. Both were marked high-severity. Together they describe a kitchen where the most basic barrier against contamination was not functioning.
Food contact surfaces, the cutting boards, prep tables, and utensils that touch food directly, were cited as not properly cleaned or sanitized. And no person in charge was present or performing supervisory duties during the inspection.
That last violation is not administrative. CDC data links the absence of active managerial control to three times the rate of critical violations at food service establishments.
What These Violations Mean
The parasite destruction citation is one of the more serious violations a kitchen can receive and one of the least visible to customers. Fish that has not been frozen to the required temperature and duration before serving can carry live Anisakis larvae, a roundworm that embeds in the stomach lining and causes severe abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting. Proper freezing kills these parasites before the fish reaches a plate. When those procedures are skipped or undocumented, there is no way to know whether any given dish was safe.
The shellfish records failure is equally serious for a different reason. Shellfish are filter feeders that concentrate bacteria and toxins from the water they grow in. The tagging and recordkeeping system exists so regulators can trace an outbreak back to a specific harvest location and pull product before more people are harmed. Without those records at Jamaica House Restaurant II, that traceability chain was broken.
The handwashing violations, two of them on the same inspection, describe a contamination pathway that is direct and well-documented. Hands carry pathogens from raw protein, from surfaces, from a sick employee's own body, to every dish that employee prepares. Studies show that even a single inadequate handwashing event can transfer enough bacterial load to cause illness. Two separate citations on the same visit, one for frequency and one for technique, suggest the problem was systemic rather than incidental.
The illness reporting failure ties all of these together. A kitchen with no manager present, no handwashing discipline, and no mechanism for sick workers to stay home is a kitchen where an outbreak, if one began, would have had no early warning system.
The Longer Record
September 17 was not an outlier for this restaurant. State records show Jamaica House Restaurant II has been inspected 11 times in total, accumulating 56 violations across that history. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The inspection record shows a recurring pattern of serious violations followed by partial correction. On August 11, just five weeks before the September 17 visit, inspectors found 10 high-severity violations and 3 intermediate ones. That inspection was followed the next day, August 12, by a callback that found 1 high and 1 intermediate remaining. The September 17 inspection came five weeks later with 7 high-severity violations, suggesting the corrections from August did not hold.
The pattern goes back further. Inspections in June 2025 found 3 high-severity violations on one visit and 4 high-severity violations the following day. A November 2024 inspection found 2 high and 2 intermediate violations. The facility has logged high-severity citations in every inspection on record.
No inspection in the facility's history resulted in an emergency closure, even on the August 11 visit that produced 10 high-severity violations in a single day.
Open for Business
The September 18 callback inspection, conducted the day after the seven-violation visit, found 1 high-severity and 1 intermediate violation remaining. The restaurant was not closed on September 17, and it was not closed after the callback either.
Customers who ate at Jamaica House Restaurant II during or after the September 17 inspection did so while the facility was operating under a seven-count high-severity record that included unverified parasite procedures, untraceable shellfish, and a kitchen with no supervisor on duty.
The restaurant remained open.
