MIAMI, FL. Inspectors visiting Paseo Catracho at 824 SW 8th Street on August 17 found food coming from unapproved or unknown sources, a violation that means no one can trace where the ingredients came from or whether they passed any safety inspection. Despite that finding and five other high-severity violations documented the same afternoon, the restaurant was not closed.
The state allowed it to remain open.
What Inspectors Found
The inspection on August 17 produced nine total violations: six high-severity and three intermediate. The six high-severity citations covered nearly every critical control point in the kitchen. No qualified person in charge was present or performing supervisory duties. At least one employee was not reporting illness symptoms, a requirement that exists specifically to prevent sick workers from spreading pathogens to food. Handwashing technique was documented as improper, meaning employees were going through the motions without actually removing contaminants from their hands.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized, creating a direct transfer route for bacteria between raw and ready-to-eat ingredients. Food was not cooked to required minimum temperatures, meaning pathogens that heat is supposed to kill were surviving to the plate.
The three intermediate violations added further concerns. Inspectors cited improper sewage or wastewater disposal, single-use items being reused, and inadequate ventilation and lighting throughout the facility.
A follow-up inspection was conducted the next day, August 18. It found two high-severity violations and two intermediate violations still present.
What These Violations Mean
The food-from-unapproved-sources violation is the one that makes traceability impossible. When a restaurant sources ingredients through licensed, inspected suppliers, there is a paper trail. If a customer gets sick, investigators can follow that trail back to a farm, a distributor, a processing facility. When food comes from an unknown or unapproved source, that trail does not exist. The food bypasses USDA and FDA safety inspections entirely, and it can carry Listeria, Salmonella, or E. coli without anyone knowing until people are already ill.
The undercooking violation compounds that risk directly. If ingredients sourced outside the regulated supply chain also are not cooked to the temperatures required to kill pathogens, the two violations together create a nearly unobstructed path from a contaminated ingredient to a sick customer.
The illness-reporting failure at Paseo Catracho is a separate and acute danger. Norovirus, one of the most common causes of foodborne illness outbreaks, spreads readily from an infected food worker to every plate that worker touches. The requirement that employees report symptoms exists because the kitchen is one of the few places where a single sick person can expose dozens of customers in a single shift.
The management failure ties all of it together. CDC data shows that facilities without active managerial control document three times as many critical violations as those with engaged supervision on the floor. On August 17 at Paseo Catracho, no such supervision was recorded as present.
The Longer Record
The August 17 inspection was not an aberration. State records show Paseo Catracho has been inspected 32 times and has accumulated 400 total violations across that history.
The eight most recent inspections before August 17 tell a consistent story. The April 2026 visit produced nine high-severity violations and five intermediate ones. November 2025 brought five high-severity violations. January 2025 added four high-severity and three intermediate. Going back further, July 2024 and February 2024 each produced five high-severity violations. There is no inspection in the recent record that came back clean.
The restaurant was emergency-closed once before, in August 2017, for roach activity. It was allowed to reopen the following day. That closure is the only time in the facility's documented history that regulators used the emergency-closure authority the state grants them.
The pattern across 2024, 2025, and 2026 is one of recurring high-severity violations in overlapping categories: management failures, food safety technique, contamination risks. The April 2026 inspection was the worst recent result on record, with nine high-severity violations. The August 17 inspection came four months later with six.
Open for Business
Six high-severity violations, including food from an unknown source and food not cooked to required temperatures, were documented at Paseo Catracho on August 17, 2026. The follow-up inspection the next day still found high-severity violations present.
The restaurant was not emergency-closed after either visit.
