MIAMI BEACH, FL. A Washington Avenue café operated without an approved potable water supply during a May 18 state inspection, a violation that means water used for cooking, rinsing produce, and washing hands may have carried E. coli, Cryptosporidium, or Legionella. Inspectors also found that parasite destruction procedures had not been followed for fish on the menu. The restaurant was not emergency-closed.
Miam Café at 1201 Washington Ave accumulated six high-severity violations and three intermediate violations in a single inspection, a total of nine citations across the two most serious tiers state inspectors use.
What Inspectors Found
The water violation is the one that touches everything. Non-potable water in a food establishment moves through ice, through the rinse cycle on produce, through the hands of every employee who washes up at a sink. It is not a single-point risk.
The parasite violation compounds that picture. Fish served without verified freezing or cooking to parasite-destruction standards can contain Anisakis, a roundworm that embeds in stomach and intestinal walls. Customers who ate fish dishes at Miam Café on or before May 18 had no way of knowing whether those controls had been applied.
Inspectors also cited the café for inadequate shell stock identification and records. Oysters, clams, and mussels are consumed raw or barely cooked, and the state requires dealers to maintain tags that trace each batch to its harvest location. Without those records, there is no way to identify the source if customers report illness.
The employee illness violation rounds out a cluster of risks that operate simultaneously. An employee who does not report symptoms of norovirus or hepatitis A continues to handle food and surfaces. That is the mechanism behind the majority of multi-victim restaurant outbreaks documented by the CDC.
Wastewater disposal was also flagged as improper, an intermediate violation but one that creates fecal contamination pathways throughout the facility. Multi-use utensils were found not properly cleaned, a condition that allows bacterial biofilms to develop within 24 hours on surfaces that look clean.
What These Violations Mean
The potable water and sewage violations, taken together, describe a facility where the basic infrastructure of food safety was not functioning on May 18. Water that has not been verified as potable can carry E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and Giardia, organisms that cause severe gastrointestinal illness. Improper sewage disposal adds a second contamination pathway that can reach prep surfaces, utensils, and food directly.
The parasite destruction failure is a distinct and specific risk. State and federal rules require that fish intended for raw or undercooked service be frozen to a defined temperature for a defined period, a process that kills Anisakis and tapeworm larvae. When a facility cannot document that this was done, the question of whether it was done at all has no answer.
Shell stock traceability is the mechanism the state uses to pull a product off the market quickly when an illness cluster is reported. At Miam Café, inspectors found that mechanism was absent. If someone who ate shellfish there became ill with Vibrio or norovirus, investigators would have no harvest record to trace.
The time-as-public-health-control violation is less visible but equally serious. Some foods are kept at room temperature intentionally, under a protocol that requires precise tracking of how long they have been out. When that protocol is not followed, food sits in the bacterial growth zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, for unknown durations.
The Longer Record
Miam Café has three inspections on record, including the May 18 visit, with a total of 20 violations documented across all of them. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The December 2025 inspection found two high-severity violations and one intermediate, a smaller citation count but one that already included serious-tier findings. The most recent prior inspection, recorded May 19, the day after the nine-violation visit, found one high-severity violation and no intermediates.
The sequence matters. The May 18 inspection produced the largest single-day violation total in the facility's recorded history. The follow-up inspection the next day showed a reduction, but a high-severity violation remained even after the café had been put on notice.
Three inspections is a short record. There is not enough history here to call this a years-long pattern. What the record does show is that high-severity violations appeared in every inspection on file, and that the worst inspection by a significant margin was the most recent full one.
Still Open
State inspectors documented six high-severity violations at Miam Café on May 18, including the absence of an approved water supply and the failure to follow parasite destruction procedures for fish. The café was not ordered to close.
The follow-up inspection the next day found one remaining high-severity violation. No record in the data indicates that violation was resolved before the café continued serving customers.