CAPE CORAL, FL. An inspector visiting Old' Cuban Restaurant & Bar on SW Pine Island Road on July 28 found food not cooked to the required minimum temperature, a violation that means customers may have been served poultry or other proteins that hadn't reached the heat threshold needed to kill Salmonella and other pathogens. The restaurant was not closed.
That single violation was one of seven high-severity citations issued that day, along with four intermediate violations. State records show the facility remained open after the inspection.
What Inspectors Found
The July 28 inspection turned up violations across nearly every layer of food safety. Inspectors cited employees for not reporting illness symptoms and the restaurant for having no written employee health policy at all. Both violations were flagged as high severity.
Food contact surfaces were found improperly cleaned and sanitized, and employees were observed using improper handwashing technique. The restaurant also lacked a required consumer advisory for raw or undercooked items on the menu, meaning diners had no notice that certain dishes carried elevated risk.
Inspectors additionally cited the facility for failing to follow required procedures for specialized food processes, a category that covers methods like smoking, curing, or reduced-oxygen packaging where precise controls are mandatory. Among the intermediate violations was improper sewage or wastewater disposal, along with improper sanitizer concentration, single-use items being reused, and inadequate ventilation and lighting.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and employees not reporting illness symptoms is among the most direct routes to a multi-victim outbreak. Norovirus spreads person-to-person through food handled by an infected worker, and without a written policy requiring employees to report symptoms, there is no system to pull a sick worker off the line before customers are exposed.
Undercooking compounds that risk. Salmonella survives in poultry that hasn't reached 165 degrees Fahrenheit internally. A customer who orders chicken at a restaurant where cooking temperatures aren't verified has no way to know the food on their plate hasn't hit that threshold.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces, cited here as a high-severity violation, are a primary transfer point for bacteria. Cutting boards, prep surfaces, and utensils that carry residue from one food item to the next move pathogens across an entire prep cycle.
The sewage disposal violation adds a separate contamination pathway. Improper handling of wastewater in a food-preparation environment introduces fecal bacteria into a space where food is being handled, stored, and plated. That violation alone, classified as intermediate, would be alarming at a facility with an otherwise clean record. Here, it was one of eleven citations issued in a single visit.
The Longer Record
The July 28 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Old' Cuban Restaurant & Bar has been inspected 24 times, accumulating 220 total violations across its history on record, and has never been emergency-closed.
The five days before the July 28 visit tell the most immediate story. An inspection on July 23 found 10 high-severity violations and 5 intermediate ones, a total of 15 citations in a single visit. The restaurant remained open after that inspection as well.
Looking further back, the pattern holds. An inspection on February 25, 2025 found 9 high-severity violations. A follow-up two days later, on February 27, found 5 more high-severity violations. August 2025 brought another pair of inspections within six days of each other, with 7 high-severity violations on August 12 and 2 more on August 18. A September 2024 visit found 6 high-severity violations. A January 2026 visit found 6 more.
The violations that appeared on July 28, including no employee health policy, improper handwashing, and unsanitized food contact surfaces, are not new categories for this facility. They represent a pattern that state records have documented across multiple inspection cycles, in multiple years, without a single emergency closure.
Still Open
Florida's emergency closure authority exists for situations where inspectors determine a facility poses an immediate threat to public health. Seven high-severity violations, including undercooked food, unreported employee illness, and no health policy, did not trigger that determination at Old' Cuban Restaurant & Bar on July 28.
The restaurant was open for business when inspectors left.
