ORLANDO, FL. State inspectors walked into Maki Hibachi at 106 E Colonial Drive on September 9 and found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, a finding that means no federal safety inspection ever touched whatever was served to customers that day.
The restaurant logged six high-severity violations and three intermediate violations during that single visit. Despite the volume and severity of what inspectors documented, the facility was not emergency-closed.
What Inspectors Found
The unapproved food source violation is among the most serious an inspector can cite. Food that bypasses USDA and FDA inspection channels carries no traceability, meaning that if a customer became ill, investigators would have no supply chain to trace back to the origin.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for inadequate shellfish identification records. Shellfish, including oysters, clams, and mussels, are frequently consumed raw or lightly cooked, and the tags that accompany each shipment are the only mechanism for tracing a contaminated batch after someone gets sick. Without those records, there is no way to know where the shellfish came from.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled near food. That violation sits alongside the unapproved food sourcing citation as one of the most immediately dangerous findings of the visit.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized, and multi-use utensils had not been properly cleaned either. Inspectors also noted that single-use items were being reused and that wiping cloths were being used improperly, a combination that creates multiple simultaneous contamination pathways across the kitchen.
The Illness Problem
Two of the six high-severity violations involved sick workers. Inspectors found no written employee health policy and separately cited employees for not reporting symptoms of illness.
Those two violations together describe a kitchen where a worker could come in sick, handle food, and face no formal system requiring them to disclose that to management. Norovirus, the most common cause of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurant settings, spreads through exactly this route.
The absence of a written health policy is not a paperwork technicality. It is the foundational document that tells workers what symptoms require them to stay home and what management is required to do when a worker reports feeling ill. Without it, the reporting violation becomes almost inevitable.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of unapproved food sourcing and missing shellfish traceability records at Maki Hibachi means that anyone who ate there on or before September 9 consumed food with no verifiable safety chain. If that food carried Listeria, Salmonella, or another pathogen, there would be no supplier record to pull and no batch to recall.
The employee illness violations compound the risk. Food workers are the primary transmission vector for Norovirus, which causes an estimated 20 million illnesses in the United States annually. A kitchen with no health policy and no reporting requirement is structurally unable to interrupt that transmission route.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces and multi-use utensils allow bacterial biofilms to develop within 24 hours. Those biofilms are resistant to standard cleaning and can transfer bacteria to every item that touches the surface afterward. Paired with the reuse of single-use items and misuse of wiping cloths, the inspection describes a facility where contamination could move from one food item to the next through several different channels simultaneously.
Improperly stored or labeled toxic chemicals near food present a separate and acute risk, one that does not require bacterial growth or time to cause harm.
The Longer Record
The September 9 inspection was not an anomaly. Maki Hibachi has accumulated 191 total violations across 20 inspections on record, a figure that averages nearly 10 violations per visit.
The pattern in the months surrounding this inspection is consistent. A February 18 inspection found 8 high-severity and 5 intermediate violations. A follow-up one week later, on February 25, found the same count: 8 high and 5 intermediate. An October 2025 inspection found 5 high-severity violations, and a follow-up the very next day found the same 5 high-severity violations still present. A May 2025 inspection logged 7 high-severity violations.
The only period in the record where the numbers dropped significantly was late June 2025, when two consecutive inspections found zero high-severity violations and just one intermediate between them. That window did not last. By October 2025, the high-severity citations had returned.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history, despite accumulating violations in the same categories across multiple years and multiple inspection cycles.
A follow-up inspection on September 10, the day after the visit that produced six high-severity violations, found 2 high-severity and 1 intermediate violation still present.
The facility remained open throughout.
