ORLANDO, FL. A state inspector walked into Martin Cafeteria Main on Sandlake Road on May 19, 2026, and found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, meaning no USDA or FDA inspection had touched it before it reached customers' plates.
That was one of 17 high-severity violations documented that day. The cafeteria was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The violations stack up across nearly every layer of food safety. Inspectors cited inadequate handwashing by employees, improper handwashing technique, and inadequate handwashing facilities, meaning the infrastructure to wash hands properly was itself deficient.
Three separate violations addressed illness: no written employee health policy, no employee illness reporting, and employees not reporting symptoms. Together, those three citations describe a workplace where a sick employee had no formal obligation to disclose illness and no written policy requiring it.
The inspector also documented food in poor condition or adulterated, food contact surfaces not properly cleaned or sanitized, and time as a public health control not properly used. Toxic chemicals were both improperly stored and improperly identified. Parasite destruction procedures were not followed, a citation that applies to fish, pork, and wild game served without the required freezing or cooking protocols.
No person in charge was present or performing duties at the time of the inspection.
What These Violations Mean
Food from an unapproved or unknown source is not a paperwork problem. It means the facility served ingredients that bypassed federal safety inspection entirely. If a customer got sick, there would be no chain of custody to trace the food back to its origin, and no way to identify whether other customers received the same contaminated product.
The illness-reporting cluster is more immediately dangerous. Norovirus, which causes roughly 20 million infections in the United States annually, spreads directly from food workers to customers when employees handle food while symptomatic. A written health policy is the mechanism that stops an infected worker from showing up and serving food. Martin Cafeteria Main had none.
Undercooking is one of the most direct routes for Salmonella to reach a customer's plate. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. The citation for food not cooked to required minimum temperature, combined with the citation for time as a public health control not properly used, means food sat in the bacterial growth range without either temperature or time being managed to compensate.
Improper chemical storage adds a separate category of risk. Cleaning agents stored near or above food preparation areas can contaminate food through spills or mislabeling. The inspector cited both improper storage and improper identification of toxic substances, two distinct failures in the same category.
The Longer Record
The May 2026 inspection is not the first time Martin Cafeteria Main has drawn high-severity citations. State records show 25 inspections on file, with 192 total violations across the facility's history.
Every inspection in the prior eight visits produced at least two high-severity violations. The February 2023 inspection logged five high-severity and three intermediate violations. The October 2025 inspection, the most recent before this one, logged three high-severity violations.
None of those prior inspections resulted in an emergency closure. The facility has zero emergency closures on record across 25 inspections.
What changed in May 2026 was scale. The prior inspections ranged from two to five high-severity violations per visit. This inspection produced 17, more than three times the previous single-visit high in the available record. The jump is not a new pattern emerging; it is an existing pattern at a magnitude the prior record had not reached.
The cafeteria has been cycling through high-severity citations since at least February 2022, the earliest inspection in the provided history. The categories have shifted from visit to visit, but the severity level has not dropped below two high-priority violations in any recorded inspection.
Still Open
Florida's emergency closure authority applies when an inspector determines that continued operation poses an immediate threat to public health. The threshold is a judgment call, and the inspector who visited Martin Cafeteria Main on May 19 did not make that call.
Seventeen high-severity violations, including no illness reporting policy, food from unapproved sources, no person in charge, and food not cooked to minimum temperature, were documented and the cafeteria at 5600 Sandlake Road remained open for business.