FERNANDINA BEACH, FL. Toxic chemicals were stored improperly near food, no manager was present to oversee operations, and employees were using improper handwashing technique — and when state inspectors walked out of New China at 1013 Amelia Plaza on August 24, the restaurant stayed open.
The inspection turned up six high-severity violations and four intermediate violations, a total of ten citations documenting failures at nearly every layer of basic food safety. The facility was not emergency-closed.
What Inspectors Found
The chemical storage violation is among the most immediately dangerous a food service inspector can document. Cleaning agents and other toxic substances stored near food create a direct contamination pathway, and mislabeled chemicals have caused acute poisoning incidents in restaurant settings.
The absence of a person in charge compounds every other violation on the list. When no qualified manager is present and actively overseeing operations, there is no one positioned to catch or correct the failures happening around them.
Employees were also cited for improper handwashing technique. That is distinct from not washing hands at all. It means workers were going through the motions of handwashing without removing pathogens, then returning to food preparation.
Food contact surfaces — the cutting boards, prep tables, and equipment that touch the food customers eat — were not properly cleaned or sanitized. Inspectors also found that time was not being properly used as a public health control, meaning food was being held in the temperature danger zone longer than regulations allow without adequate tracking. The restaurant had no consumer advisory posted to warn customers about raw or undercooked menu items, leaving diners with no way to make an informed choice about their risk.
On the intermediate side, multi-use utensils were not being properly cleaned, single-use items were being reused, wiping cloths were being used improperly, and toilet facilities were inadequate or improperly maintained.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of improperly cleaned food contact surfaces, improperly used wiping cloths, and improper handwashing technique creates overlapping contamination pathways that reinforce each other. A wiping cloth used incorrectly can spread bacteria from one surface to another. A food contact surface that is not sanitized carries that contamination directly to the food. And an employee using improper handwashing technique carries pathogens from their hands into that same chain.
The time-as-public-health-control violation is one that does not always get the attention it deserves. When a facility uses time rather than temperature to control food safety, the food is intentionally allowed to sit in the temperature danger zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, for a defined window before being discarded. If that tracking is not done correctly, food can remain in the danger zone far longer than intended, creating conditions for bacterial growth that temperature monitoring would have caught.
The missing consumer advisory matters most to the people least able to absorb the risk. Elderly customers, pregnant women, young children, and anyone with a compromised immune system are specifically warned by health officials to avoid raw or undercooked foods. Without a posted advisory at New China, those customers had no information on which to base that choice.
The chemical storage violation is in a different category from the others. Every other violation on this list involves a failure of process. Chemicals stored near food is a structural hazard, one that does not require a process failure to cause harm.
The Longer Record
The August inspection was not an anomaly. State records show New China has been inspected 27 times, accumulating 226 total violations across its history.
The April 2026 inspection, four months before this one, produced seven high-severity violations and three intermediate ones. The January 2026 inspection produced eight high-severity violations and five intermediate ones. The restaurant has logged high-severity violations in every inspection across the past three years for which records show substantive findings.
The facility was emergency-closed once, in October 2024, after inspectors documented rodent activity. It passed a follow-up inspection the next day and reopened. Two months later, in December 2024, it logged nine high-severity violations in a single inspection, then passed a same-day follow-up.
The pattern that emerges across 27 inspections is one of repeated high-severity citations, a single closure, and continued operation. The August 24 inspection, with its six high-severity violations including toxic chemicals stored near food and no manager on duty, did not result in a closure.
New China remained open.
