ORLANDO, FL. Inspectors found food from an unapproved or unknown source at Mama Lau and OC LLC on West Colonial Drive during an August 26 inspection that produced nine high-severity violations and five intermediate ones. The restaurant, at 5038 W Colonial Dr, was not closed.
The unapproved food source violation means there is no way to trace where the food came from. If a customer got sick, investigators would have nowhere to start.
What Inspectors Found
The August 26 inspection documented a cascade of failures that touched nearly every stage of food handling. Inspectors cited inadequate handwashing and improper handwashing technique as two separate violations, meaning employees were both skipping hand-washing and performing it incorrectly when they did attempt it.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled. That violation sits alongside unsanitized food contact surfaces, which inspectors documented as a distinct high-severity finding.
On the intermediate side, inspectors found improper sewage or wastewater disposal, multi-use utensils not properly cleaned, inadequate cooling and cold-holding equipment, single-use items being reused, and inadequate ventilation and lighting. That is fourteen violations in a single visit.
What These Violations Mean
The food-from-unapproved-source violation is the one that most directly limits what health authorities can do if customers fall ill. Food that enters a kitchen outside the regulated supply chain has not been inspected by USDA or FDA, meaning it could carry Listeria, Salmonella, or E. coli with no paper trail. If an outbreak were traced to this restaurant, investigators would have no supplier records to pull.
The two handwashing violations, inadequate technique and inadequate practice, compound each other. Studies show that even a sincere attempt to wash hands that uses the wrong technique leaves enough pathogens to contaminate food. At Mama Lau and OC LLC, inspectors found workers were not washing hands adequately and not using proper technique when they did.
The absence of an employee health policy and the separate citation for employees not reporting illness symptoms is a pairing that public health officials describe as the primary driver of multi-victim outbreaks. Norovirus spreads most readily through an infected food worker with no instruction to stay home. Both failures were present here on the same day.
Improperly stored chemicals near food create a risk that has nothing to do with bacteria. Mislabeled or misplaced cleaning agents can contaminate food directly, and the effects are acute rather than slow-developing.
The Longer Record
The August 26 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Mama Lau and OC LLC has been inspected 34 times and has accumulated 309 total violations across that history.
The two most recent inspections before August 26 tell the same story in smaller numbers. On April 23, 2026, inspectors cited seven high-severity violations and three intermediate ones. On September 4, 2025, they found four high-severity and one intermediate. The facility has logged high-severity violations in every inspection on record over the past two years.
The restaurant has been emergency-closed twice. In August 2024, inspectors shut it down for rodent activity. It reopened two days later. In December 2019, it was closed for roach activity and reopened on January 2, 2020. The October 2024 inspection, conducted two days after that rodent closure, still produced six high-severity violations.
The Pattern
The inspection history at this address shows no stretch of clean visits. The August 25, 2025 inspection found five high-severity violations. The August 27, 2025 inspection, two days later, found five more. In August 2024, the restaurant was emergency-closed, reopened, and then cited for six high-severity violations in the same week.
Three hundred and nine violations across 34 inspections works out to more than nine violations per visit on average. The August 26 inspection, with fourteen total, was above that average.
The facility has been cited for food-handling failures, equipment failures, chemical storage failures, and pest activity at different points in its record. These are not variations on a single recurring problem. They span multiple categories of basic food safety.
State records show the restaurant remained open following the August 26 inspection, nine high-severity violations and all.
