JACKSONVILLE, FL. A state inspector walked into One Night Taco Stand on San Jose Boulevard on August 11 and found the restaurant operating without an approved potable water supply, one of six high-severity violations cited that day, and the facility never closed its doors.
The restaurant at 9703 San Jose Blvd kept serving customers despite a violation record that included no safe water source, employees not reporting illness symptoms, improper handwashing technique, unsanitized food contact surfaces, no consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods, and no person in charge performing their duties. Five additional intermediate violations were also cited.
What Inspectors Found
The potable water violation sits at the top of this list for a reason. Water touches nearly everything in a food service operation: handwashing, produce rinsing, equipment cleaning, ice production, cooking. Non-potable water can carry E. coli, Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and Legionella, pathogens that don't announce themselves until someone is already sick.
Paired with that was the sewage disposal violation, an intermediate citation but one that compounds the water problem directly. Inadequate wastewater handling creates fecal contamination risk throughout a facility, on surfaces, on hands, and on the food itself.
The inspector also cited improperly cleaned food contact surfaces and multi-use utensils that had not been properly sanitized. Those two violations together describe a kitchen where the surfaces and tools that touch food are transferring whatever was on them last.
What These Violations Mean
The no-potable-water violation is not a paperwork problem. Every step of food preparation at a restaurant requires clean water, and if the source is unapproved, there is no way to verify what contaminants it carries. Customers who ate at One Night Taco Stand on August 11 had no way of knowing the water used to prepare their food had not been certified safe.
The illness-reporting failure is a separate and direct transmission risk. Food workers who do not report symptoms, vomiting, diarrhea, jaundice, are the primary driver of multi-victim outbreaks. Norovirus, the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States, spreads through exactly this mechanism: a symptomatic employee handles food, and customers eat it.
Improper handwashing technique means that even when an employee went through the motions of washing their hands, pathogens remained. Combined with a citation for no person in charge performing their duties, the inspection describes a kitchen operating without oversight, without proper hygiene, and without safe water.
The consumer advisory violation adds one more layer. Customers who are elderly, pregnant, immunocompromised, or very young face elevated risk from raw or undercooked proteins. Without a posted advisory, they cannot make an informed choice about what they order.
The Longer Record
This was not a bad day at an otherwise clean restaurant. State records show One Night Taco Stand has accumulated 268 violations across 42 inspections on record, and the August 11 visit fits a pattern that stretches back years.
The facility was cited for 5 high-severity and 5 intermediate violations on September 6, 2024. A follow-up inspection four days later showed zero violations. Then came December 11, 2024: 5 high-severity and 4 intermediate violations again. A follow-up the next day showed zero violations. The cycle repeated on July 7, 2025, with 5 high-severity and 2 intermediate violations, and again on October 21, 2025, with 6 high-severity and 4 intermediate violations.
The August 11, 2026 inspection produced 6 high-severity violations, matching the October 2025 total. A follow-up on August 19 showed zero violations.
That pattern, serious citations followed by a clean follow-up, repeated across at least five inspection cycles, raises a specific question the records alone cannot answer: whether the corrections made after each follow-up are holding between inspections, or whether the same conditions are returning each time the inspector leaves. The violation count across 42 inspections, 268 total, suggests the latter.
The facility has never been emergency-closed.
Still Open
State inspectors cited One Night Taco Stand for operating without an approved potable water supply, for failing to ensure employees reported illness symptoms, for unsanitized food contact surfaces, for improper sewage disposal, and for having no person in charge on duty. They documented all of it on August 11.
The restaurant stayed open.
