PANAMA CITY, FL. A state inspector walked into the Outback Steakhouse at 861 W 23rd Street on May 4 and documented food not cooked to the required minimum temperature, a violation that means customers may have been served meat carrying live pathogens. The restaurant was not emergency-closed. It kept serving food.
That single violation was one of six high-severity citations issued during the inspection, along with two intermediate violations. The total of eight violations on a single day ranks as the worst single-inspection result this location has recorded in the past two years.
What Inspectors Found
The cooking temperature violation is the most direct threat to anyone who ate there that day. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and other pathogens in beef and pork require their own minimum thresholds to be killed. When those temperatures are not reached, the food arrives at the table still capable of making someone seriously ill.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for having no employee health policy, or an inadequate one. That means there was no enforceable written system in place to keep sick workers out of the kitchen and away from food preparation.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled somewhere in the facility. That citation sits alongside the finding that food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized, a combination that puts chemicals and bacteria on the same list of things that could end up in a customer's meal.
The restaurant also lacked a consumer advisory for raw or undercooked foods. Outback's menu includes items that can be ordered rare or medium-rare. Without a posted advisory, elderly customers, pregnant women, and anyone with a compromised immune system had no notice that they were taking on additional risk.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of undercooked food and no employee health policy is particularly serious. Salmonella, E. coli, and Norovirus are all transmitted through exactly this pairing: a sick employee who has no policy requiring them to stay home, handling food that is then not cooked to the temperature that would kill what they left behind.
Improper handwashing technique compounds that risk. The citation does not mean employees skipped handwashing entirely. It means they went through the motion incorrectly, leaving pathogens on their hands even after washing. Those hands then touched food, surfaces, and utensils.
Food contact surfaces that are not properly cleaned or sanitized function as a relay. Bacteria from raw meat transferred to a cutting board or prep surface can move to the next item placed there, whether that item is cooked or not. Paired with the temperature violation, this means there were multiple points in the kitchen where contamination could have occurred and survived.
The chemical storage violation adds a separate category of danger. Cleaning agents and sanitizers stored near or above food, or in unlabeled containers, can cause acute poisoning. This is not a slow-developing risk like bacterial illness. Ingesting a cleaning chemical produces immediate symptoms.
The Longer Record
The May 4 inspection was the 23rd on record for this location. Across those 23 inspections, state records show 82 total violations. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
High-severity violations are not new here. The location logged three high-severity citations in August 2023, three more in December 2025, and two each in June 2025 and January 2024. There has not been a single inspection period in the past three years without at least one high-severity finding, with the sole exception of January 2026.
The day after the May 4 inspection, a follow-up visit on May 5 found one remaining high-severity violation. That means at least one serious issue was still present after inspectors had already flagged the full list.
The pattern across the inspection history is not one of a restaurant that had a bad week. It is a record of persistent high-severity citations across multiple inspection cycles, with brief clean periods between them.
The Restaurant Stayed Open
Florida law gives inspectors the authority to order an emergency closure when conditions pose an immediate danger to public health. Six high-severity violations, including undercooked food, no health policy for sick employees, improperly sanitized food contact surfaces, and toxic chemicals stored without proper labeling, did not meet that threshold on May 4.
The Outback Steakhouse on West 23rd Street served customers that day, and every day since.