MIAMI, FL. State inspectors visited Pubbelly Sushi at 701 South Miami Ave on June 12 and documented that the restaurant was not following parasite destruction procedures for raw fish, a failure that leaves diners exposed to Anisakis and tapeworm in every piece of sushi served without proper freezing or cooking protocols. The restaurant was not closed.
The June 12 inspection produced eight high-severity violations and one intermediate, a total that would trigger emergency closure at many facilities. At Pubbelly Sushi, it did not.
What Inspectors Found
The parasite destruction failure is particularly pointed at a sushi restaurant. Raw and lightly cooked fish must be frozen to specific temperatures for specific time periods before service to kill parasites including Anisakis, which can burrow into the stomach lining and cause severe abdominal pain, and tapeworm species that can establish in the intestinal tract. When those procedures are not followed, every raw fish dish on the menu carries that risk.
The shell stock records violation compounds the concern. Shellfish, including oysters and clams, must arrive with identification tags that allow inspectors and health officials to trace them back to their harvest bed if customers become ill. Without those records, there is no traceability. If a customer develops a Vibrio or norovirus infection after eating oysters at Pubbelly Sushi, investigators have no chain of custody to follow.
Inspectors also cited improper storage or use of toxic substances, a violation that carries immediate risk of chemical contamination of food. Toxic substance violations typically involve cleaning chemicals stored near or above food preparation surfaces, or unlabeled chemical containers in food handling areas.
The remaining high-severity violations covered a wide span of the kitchen's basic operations: food employees not washing hands properly, food contact surfaces not cleaned and sanitized, food not cooked to required minimum temperatures, food in poor condition or mislabeled, and time being used as a public health control without the required documentation and procedures. The intermediate violation involved multi-use utensils not properly cleaned, which creates conditions for bacterial biofilm to develop on surfaces that contact food at every subsequent use.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of parasite destruction failures and inadequate shell stock records at a sushi restaurant is not a paperwork problem. It is a direct exposure question for every customer who ordered raw fish or shellfish on June 12 or in the days surrounding the inspection.
Parasite destruction requires either cooking fish to an internal temperature that kills parasites, or freezing it at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit for seven days, or minus 31 degrees for 15 hours. When a facility is cited for not following those procedures, it means inspectors found evidence that one or both of those pathways was not being applied to fish being served raw. At a sushi restaurant, that is the core of the menu.
The handwashing violation is what inspectors call a contamination pathway citation. It means food employees were observed not washing hands at required intervals, or not washing them adequately, or bypassing hand sinks entirely. Hands carry bacteria and viruses directly onto food surfaces and into food. Combined with improperly cleaned food contact surfaces and utensils developing bacterial biofilm, the June 12 inspection describes a kitchen where multiple contamination routes were simultaneously open.
Time as a public health control, when used correctly, is an alternative to temperature monitoring: a restaurant documents when food entered the temperature danger zone and discards it after four hours. When that system is not properly followed, food sits in the danger zone for unknown periods, allowing bacterial growth that temperature monitoring would have caught and flagged.
The Longer Record
The June 12 inspection is not an aberration at Pubbelly Sushi. It is the continuation of a pattern that state records show running back at least four years.
The facility has 22 inspections on record and 231 total violations. Every single inspection going back to at least 2022 has produced high-severity violations. The February 2026 inspection found eight high-severity and three intermediate violations. The March 2025 inspection found eight high-severity violations. The November 2024 inspection found eight high-severity and one intermediate. The April 2024 inspections found eight high-severity and two intermediate on one visit, and five high-severity and one intermediate on a follow-up the same day. The January 2024 inspection was the worst on record in this dataset: 12 high-severity and two intermediate violations.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in 22 inspections.
That is the detail the record leaves on the table. Eight high-severity violations in June 2026, at a restaurant that has logged eight or more high-severity violations in six of its last eight inspections, and the doors stayed open.