OCOEE, FL. Inspectors who walked into Mi Querida Cocina at 11077 W Colonial Dr on September 8, 2026 found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers sitting in a restaurant that had no written employee health policy, no person in charge performing duties, and toxic chemicals stored improperly near food areas. The facility was not closed.
State records show the inspection produced nine high-severity violations and four intermediate violations, a total of 13 citations from a single visit. Under Florida's inspection framework, high-severity violations are those most directly linked to foodborne illness outbreaks and acute public health risk.
The restaurant remained open and serving customers after inspectors left.
What Inspectors Found
The food sourcing violation stands as the most acute risk in the September report. When food arrives from suppliers who have not been approved or verified by state or federal authorities, it has bypassed USDA and FDA safety inspections entirely. If a contamination event occurs, there is no supply chain record to trace it.
Inspectors also cited a failure to follow parasite destruction procedures. Fish, pork, and wild game that are served raw or undercooked require specific freezing or cooking protocols to kill parasites including Anisakis and Trichinella. Without those steps, the parasites reach the customer's plate intact.
Toxic chemicals were documented as improperly stored or labeled. That violation, alongside the food sourcing citation, placed Mi Querida Cocina among the more alarming single-visit records in Orange County this inspection cycle.
The three illness-related violations compounded the picture. No written employee health policy. No mechanism for employees to report symptoms. And no person in charge present or performing duties to enforce either. Those three violations do not exist in isolation: each one makes the others more dangerous.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and no illness reporting mechanism is one the CDC has specifically identified as an outbreak driver. Norovirus alone accounts for an estimated 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year, and the most common transmission route is an infected food worker who did not know to report symptoms or was not required to. At Mi Querida Cocina, inspectors found both the policy and the reporting system were absent.
The absence of a person in charge performing duties amplifies every other violation on the list. CDC data shows establishments without active managerial control accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of those with engaged oversight. When no one is monitoring food handling, temperature controls, sanitization, or employee hygiene, violations in each of those categories become more likely simultaneously.
Improperly cleaned multi-use utensils, also cited in September, develop bacterial biofilms within 24 hours of inadequate sanitization. Those biofilms are resistant to standard cleaning once established. Combined with the food contact surface sanitization failure also noted by inspectors, the cross-contamination risk at the facility was not theoretical.
The sewage and wastewater disposal violation adds a separate layer. Improper sewage handling introduces fecal contamination pathways into a food preparation environment. That violation, intermediate in severity classification, carries consequences that are anything but intermediate in practice.
The Longer Record
Mi Querida Cocina: Inspection History, High-Severity Violations
The September 2026 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Mi Querida Cocina has been inspected 29 times and has accumulated 290 total violations across that history. Every inspection in the prior three years produced at least two high-severity violations. Most produced far more.
The March 2025 inspection logged eight high-severity violations. The November 2025 inspection produced four high-severity and six intermediate. The pattern across 2022 through 2026 shows a facility that repeatedly reaches the upper range of high-severity citations, dips briefly, and climbs again. The September 2026 total of nine high-severity violations matched the facility's previous single-visit high, recorded in September 2022.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history.
No emergency closure order followed the September 8, 2026 inspection either. Nine high-severity violations, including food from unapproved sources and no illness reporting structure, and the restaurant remained open on West Colonial Drive.
