DAYTONA BEACH, FL. A state inspector walked into a Daytona Beach restaurant complex last month and found that food was not being cooked to required minimum temperatures, staff had no written policy for reporting illness symptoms, and parasite-destruction procedures for fish and other proteins were not being followed. The restaurant stayed open.
The September 21 inspection of Main Kitchen/Don Rico/Doc Bales/McCoy's Rum Room at 100 N. Atlantic Ave. turned up six high-severity violations and two intermediate violations. Under Florida's inspection system, high-severity violations carry the most direct potential for customer harm. Six in a single visit is a significant tally. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation did not issue an emergency closure order.
What Inspectors Found
The cooking temperature violation sits at the top of any inspector's concern list. Undercooking is among the leading causes of foodborne illness in the United States. Salmonella in poultry, for instance, survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The inspection record does not specify which menu items were affected, but the violation was flagged at the high-severity level.
Paired with that finding was a citation for failure to follow parasite-destruction procedures. Fish served raw or undercooked, pork, and wild game must be frozen to specific temperatures for specific periods to kill parasites including Anisakis, tapeworm, and Trichinella. When those steps are skipped, the parasites can survive to infect a customer.
The inspector also found that employees were not reporting illness symptoms, and that the facility had no written employee health policy, or an inadequate one. Those two violations showed up as separate line items, meaning both the structural safeguard and its active implementation were missing at the same time.
Improper handwashing technique rounded out the illness-transmission picture. The inspector noted that employees were making handwashing attempts, but doing so incorrectly. An incomplete handwashing attempt can leave pathogens on hands even when a worker believes they have washed.
The sixth high-severity citation was for the absence of a consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods. Florida law requires menus or table notices to warn diners when items are served raw or undercooked, so that customers with compromised immune systems, pregnant women, the elderly, and young children can make an informed choice.
The two intermediate violations involved sewage or wastewater disposal and inadequate ventilation and lighting. Improper sewage handling inside a food facility creates a risk of fecal contamination across surfaces, equipment, and food contact areas.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of undercooking and missing parasite-destruction procedures is not a paperwork problem. A customer who ordered fish at this facility on September 21 had no documented assurance that the protein had been frozen to parasite-killing temperatures or cooked to a safe internal temperature. Anisakis larvae in undercooked fish can cause severe abdominal pain and require surgical removal in serious cases. Trichinella in pork causes muscle inflammation that can last for months.
The illness-reporting failures multiply that risk. When a facility has no written health policy and staff are not reporting symptoms, a worker sick with Norovirus can move through a kitchen shift, touching food and surfaces, without any system in place to stop it. Norovirus is the leading cause of multi-victim foodborne outbreaks in the United States. The absence of both the policy and the reporting behavior at the same time means neither layer of that defense was functioning on the day of inspection.
The sewage violation adds a separate contamination pathway. Raw sewage contains E. coli, Hepatitis A, and other pathogens. Improper disposal inside a food facility puts those agents into the same space where food is prepared and plated.
The missing consumer advisory, on its own, is often treated as a technical violation. Here, it sits alongside documented undercooking, which means customers were not warned about a risk the inspection record suggests was real.
The Longer Record
This was not the facility's first difficult inspection. State records show 29 inspections on file and 250 total violations accumulated over the life of the record. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The inspection history shows a facility that has cycled through serious violation counts before. On February 7, 2025, inspectors documented 10 high-severity violations and 4 intermediate violations in a single visit. A follow-up inspection three days later, on February 10, still found 2 high-severity and 3 intermediate violations. The August 2024 inspection logged 4 high-severity and 3 intermediate violations. January 2026 brought 4 high-severity and 2 intermediate violations.
The March 2026 inspections showed improvement. A visit on March 25 turned up zero high-severity violations and zero intermediate violations. That clean record lasted less than six months.
The September 21 visit, with its 6 high-severity citations, is the second-highest single-inspection high-severity count in the records provided, behind only the February 2025 visit. The violations found this month, including cooking temperatures, parasite procedures, and illness reporting, overlap with the categories that have drawn repeated citations at this address.
The facility at 100 N. Atlantic Ave. has never been ordered closed in 29 inspections. After the September 21 visit, it remained open.
