ORLANDO, FL. Food served at Knights Curry Express on University Boulevard on June 16 came from sources inspectors could not verify as approved, meaning it bypassed the federal safety inspections that would catch Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli before the food reached a customer's plate.
That was one of 12 high-severity violations state inspectors documented at the restaurant that day. The facility was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The full list reads like a checklist of the conditions most likely to make someone sick. Inspectors cited inadequate handwashing and, separately, improper handwashing technique, meaning employees were washing their hands but not washing them correctly. Both violations appeared on the same inspection report.
Parasite destruction procedures were not followed. That citation applies when fish, pork, or wild game is served without the freezing or cooking protocols required to kill parasites including Anisakis and Trichinella. The restaurant also had inadequate shell stock identification records, the traceability system that allows health officials to trace a shellfish-linked illness back to its harvest bed.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized. Inspectors also found single-use items being reused and multi-use utensils not properly cleaned. Improper sewage or wastewater disposal rounded out the intermediate violations.
No person in charge was present or performing duties during the inspection.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and employees not reporting illness symptoms is the operational profile most associated with multi-victim outbreaks. Norovirus, which causes roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, spreads most efficiently when a sick food worker handles food without any system in place to keep them off the line. At Knights Curry Express, inspectors found both the missing policy and the missing reporting on the same day.
Food from unapproved sources is a traceability problem as much as a safety problem. If a customer becomes ill after eating there, investigators need to trace the food back through a licensed distributor or processor to identify the contamination point. Food that entered the kitchen outside that chain cannot be traced. The June 16 inspection found that supply chain gap in place.
The allergen violation carries its own specific risk. Food allergies affect an estimated 32 million Americans, and allergic reactions send roughly 30,000 people to emergency rooms each year. A kitchen that cannot demonstrate allergen awareness is a kitchen where a customer with a peanut, shellfish, or dairy allergy has no reliable protection.
Improper sewage disposal creates a contamination pathway that reaches every surface in a kitchen. Raw sewage contains pathogens including E. coli and Hepatitis A. That violation, combined with food contact surfaces that were not properly sanitized, means contamination had multiple routes to the food itself.
The Longer Record
The June 16 inspection was the 17th on record for Knights Curry Express. Across those 17 inspections, the facility has accumulated 109 total violations. It has never been emergency-closed.
The pattern in the prior inspection record is uneven but not new. In January 2020, inspectors found seven high-severity violations. In March 2021, they found five. The July 2024 inspection turned up three high-severity violations. Then, in December 2025, just six months before this inspection, the facility logged zero high-severity violations and only two intermediate ones.
That December 2025 result makes the June 2026 findings harder to explain as a slow drift. The restaurant went from a near-clean inspection to 12 high-severity violations in six months.
The violations from prior years share categories with what inspectors found in June. High-severity citations have appeared in multiple inspection cycles. The June 2026 inspection did not introduce a new problem so much as it documented an old one at a new scale.
The Longer Record: Still Open
State inspectors visited Knights Curry Express on June 16, 2026, documented 12 high-severity violations and 5 intermediate violations, and left the restaurant open.
The facility has no prior emergency closures across 17 inspections and 109 documented violations. Whether that record reflects consistent correction after each visit or consistent return to the same conditions is a question the inspection dates alone cannot answer.
Customers who ate at the restaurant on University Boulevard on or after June 16 did so while the violations documented that day remained on the public record, unresolved.