DUNEDIN, FL. In April 2026, state inspectors walked into MR LC Sushi Hibachi & Asian Bistro on Main Street and documented that the restaurant was not following parasite destruction procedures for its fish, meaning customers who ordered sushi or other raw fish dishes that month may have been eating seafood that had never been properly frozen or cooked to kill Anisakis worms and tapeworm larvae. The restaurant was not closed.
That single violation was one of nine high-severity citations inspectors recorded on April 30. When the inspection was over, MR LC Sushi remained open for business.
What Inspectors Found
The April 30 inspection produced nine high-severity violations and two intermediate ones, eleven citations in total. Beyond the parasite failure, inspectors found that toxic chemicals were improperly stored or labeled near food areas, a violation that can cause acute poisoning if a chemical contaminates a food surface or is mistaken for another substance.
Food was not being cooked to required minimum temperatures. Food contact surfaces, the cutting boards, prep tables, and equipment that touches ingredients directly, were not properly cleaned or sanitized.
The restaurant also had no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked foods. That notice is what tells a pregnant woman, an elderly customer, or someone on immunosuppressant medication that ordering raw fish carries a specific risk. Without it, those diners had no warning.
Handwashing failures compounded the picture. Inspectors cited both inadequate handwashing facilities and improper hand and arm washing technique, meaning employees either lacked the physical infrastructure to wash their hands correctly or were not doing so even when facilities were available. The restaurant also had no written employee health policy, which is the document that instructs workers to stay home when sick and defines which illnesses require reporting to management. Multi-use utensils were not properly cleaned, and wiping cloths were used improperly, two intermediate citations that, alongside the high-severity findings, described a kitchen with overlapping contamination risks on nearly every surface.
There was no person in charge present or performing supervisory duties during the inspection.
What These Violations Mean
The parasite destruction failure is the violation most specific to a sushi restaurant, and it carries a direct biological consequence. Fish served raw or undercooked without proper prior freezing can harbor Anisakis larvae, a parasitic roundworm that embeds in the stomach lining and causes severe abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting. Proper parasite destruction requires freezing fish to specific temperatures for defined periods before it is served raw. When that step is skipped, every raw fish dish served becomes a potential exposure.
The absence of a consumer advisory compounds that risk. Customers who might have chosen to avoid raw fish if warned had no information to act on.
The chemicals citation is a different category of danger. Improperly stored or unlabeled toxic chemicals near food preparation areas create a contamination pathway that has nothing to do with bacteria or parasites. A mislabeled container, a chemical stored above a prep surface, or a cleaning agent used on a food contact surface without proper rinsing can cause acute poisoning in the customer who eats the next dish prepared there.
Food not cooked to minimum required temperatures means that whatever pathogens were present on raw ingredients, Salmonella in poultry, E. coli in proteins, were not killed before the food reached a plate. Combined with improperly sanitized food contact surfaces, the kitchen described in the April 30 report had multiple simultaneous routes for transferring harmful bacteria from raw ingredients to finished dishes.
The Longer Record
The April 30 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show MR LC Sushi has accumulated 187 total violations across 15 inspections on record, and the trajectory of recent visits has been moving in the wrong direction.
Three weeks before the April 30 inspection, on April 8, inspectors had already found four high-severity and two intermediate violations. Two months before that, in February 2026, the restaurant logged seven high-severity and five intermediate violations in a single visit. That February inspection was the second-worst on record by violation count, and the April 30 inspection surpassed it.
Going further back, October 2023 produced two inspections within two days. The visit on October 18 found seven high-severity violations. The visit on October 20 found three more. The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in any of those 15 inspections.
The one clean inspection in the record, zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations, came in May 2023. Every inspection since has produced high-severity citations, and the counts have grown. In the first four months of 2026 alone, the restaurant accumulated three inspections with a combined 20 high-severity violations.
Still Open
State inspectors left MR LC Sushi on April 30, 2026 having documented nine high-severity violations at an establishment with no person in charge on duty, no employee health policy, parasite risks in its fish, chemicals stored near food, and food contact surfaces that were not properly sanitized.
The restaurant remained open.