TAMPA, FL. State inspectors visiting Old Memorial Golf Club on National Golf Drive on April 20 found that the kitchen had no adequate shellfish identification records, meaning if a customer got sick from raw oysters or clams served that day, investigators would have had no way to trace where those shellfish came from.
That was one of seven high-severity violations documented in a single visit. The club was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The inspector's report documented that no person in charge was present or performing supervisory duties during the visit. CDC data shows that kitchens operating without active managerial oversight accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of supervised ones. At Old Memorial that day, the absence of supervision coincided with nearly every other category of serious violation on the inspection form.
Employees were not reporting symptoms of illness to management. Food contact surfaces were not being properly cleaned or sanitized. Staff were using improper handwashing technique, and the handwashing facilities themselves were inadequate, meaning even an employee who tried to wash their hands correctly could not do so.
The kitchen was also reusing single-use items and failing to properly clean multi-use utensils. An intermediate violation for improper sewage or wastewater disposal was also cited.
The Shellfish Problem
The shellfish traceability violation is worth pausing on. Oysters, clams, and mussels are often served raw or only lightly cooked, and they filter large volumes of water, concentrating whatever bacteria or viruses are present. When a restaurant cannot produce shellfish identification tags and harvest records, there is no chain of custody if a customer becomes ill.
The same inspection also cited the absence of a consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods. That advisory is the last line of communication between a kitchen and a diner who is elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised, or otherwise at elevated risk. Without it, those customers have no way of knowing what they are ordering carries a higher risk.
Both violations existed in the same kitchen, on the same day.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of inadequate handwashing facilities and improper technique is more serious than either violation alone. Handwashing is the single most effective barrier between a food worker and a customer. When the infrastructure is broken and the technique is wrong, pathogens including norovirus and salmonella move from hands to food to plate without interruption.
The employee illness reporting failure compounds that risk directly. Food workers who do not report symptoms, or are not required to, are the leading cause of multi-victim outbreaks. Norovirus in particular spreads from an infected food handler to dozens of customers in a single service period. The violation at Old Memorial was not about a sick employee being present that day. It was about a system that had no mechanism to catch one if they were.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces, including cutting boards and prep tables, are a primary vehicle for bacterial transfer between raw proteins and ready-to-eat foods. When multi-use utensils are also not being cleaned, and single-use items are being reused, the contamination pathways multiply. These are not isolated failures. They describe a kitchen where basic sanitation had broken down across multiple stations simultaneously.
The Longer Record
The April 20 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show 34 total inspections on file for Old Memorial Golf Club, with 174 violations accumulated across that history. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The most recent inspection before April 20 was January 29, 2026, when inspectors found 9 high-severity violations and 4 intermediate ones, the heaviest single-visit total in the recent record. Before that, an October 2024 visit turned up 3 high-severity violations, and an April 2024 inspection found 4 high-severity and 1 intermediate.
The one clean inspection in recent history was June 2025, when the facility passed with zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations. That visit sits between two inspection cycles that each produced multiple high-severity citations, suggesting the improvement did not hold.
The inspections on April 21 and April 22, the two days immediately following the April 20 visit that produced 7 high-severity violations, each showed 3 high-severity and 1 intermediate violation. The numbers dropped, but high-severity citations were still present on back-to-back follow-up visits.
Old Memorial Golf Club remained open throughout. It has never been emergency-closed in 34 inspections on record.