CORAL SPRINGS, FL. Inspectors visiting Little Havana Bar & Grill at 6240 Coral Ridge Drive on October 2 found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, meaning any shellfish, meat, or produce on those plates had bypassed the federal inspection chain entirely. The restaurant was not closed.
The inspection turned up seven high-severity violations and two intermediate ones. Among the most direct threats to customers: shellfish on hand with no identification tags or sourcing records, and no consumer advisory posted to warn diners that raw or undercooked items were on the menu.
What Inspectors Found
The food sourcing violation is the broadest of the seven. When a restaurant pulls product from unapproved or unknown suppliers, there is no USDA or FDA inspection record attached to that food. If a customer gets sick, investigators have no supply chain to trace.
The shellfish citation compounds that risk. Oysters, clams, and mussels are typically eaten raw or barely cooked, and the law requires restaurants to keep shell stock tags on file for 90 days so that any illness outbreak can be traced back to the harvest bed. No tags, no traceability.
The inspector also found that the restaurant had no written employee health policy, no proper handwashing technique in practice, food contact surfaces that had not been properly cleaned or sanitized, and a failure to correctly apply time as a public health control for food held outside refrigeration. The missing consumer advisory meant customers ordering raw or undercooked items received no written warning.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of unapproved food sourcing and missing shellfish records is the most consequential finding from this inspection. Shellfish concentrate bacteria and viruses from the water they filter, including Vibrio and norovirus. The 90-day tag requirement exists precisely because shellfish illnesses can take days to appear, by which time the batch is long gone. Without those records at Little Havana Bar & Grill, any illness tied to shellfish served there on or before October 2 would be nearly impossible to trace.
The absent employee health policy is a separate but equally direct transmission route. Without a written policy specifying when sick workers must stay home, a food handler with norovirus, Hepatitis A, or Salmonella has no formal instruction to stop working. Norovirus alone accounts for roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and a single infected food handler can expose every customer served during a shift.
Improper handwashing technique and unsanitized food contact surfaces close the loop. A worker who attempts to wash hands but uses the wrong technique, too brief, too little friction, no soap, leaves pathogens on skin that then transfer to cutting boards, utensils, and food. Improperly cleaned surfaces develop bacterial biofilms that standard wiping does not remove.
The time-as-public-health-control violation adds one more layer. When a restaurant uses time rather than refrigeration to keep food safe, strict tracking is required: food must be discarded at a set interval. Without proper documentation and adherence, food can sit in the bacterial growth zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, for an unknown length of time before reaching a customer's plate.
The Longer Record
October's inspection was not an outlier. State records show 23 inspections on file for Little Havana Bar & Grill, with 121 total violations accumulated across that history.
The pattern going back through 2024 and 2025 is one of improvement followed by regression. A September 2025 inspection found five high-severity and two intermediate violations. A March 2025 visit found three high-severity violations. A December 2024 inspection found two. Then came a clean visit in January 2026, followed immediately by a second January 2026 visit that found four high-severity violations. October's seven high-severity violations represent the highest single-inspection total in the available prior history.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in its inspection record. That means every high-severity finding, across multiple years and multiple categories, has resulted in the facility remaining in operation.
Open for Business
State inspectors left Little Havana Bar & Grill open on October 2 despite the seven high-severity citations. Florida's emergency closure authority requires an "immediate threat" to the public, a threshold inspectors did not apply here.
The seven high-severity violations documented that afternoon, food from unknown sources, untraceable shellfish, no sick-worker policy, failed handwashing, unsanitized surfaces, misused time controls, and no raw-food warning for customers, were recorded, and the dinner service continued.
