TAVARES, FL. A state inspector visited Puddle Jumpers at 111 W Ruby St on July 20 and found food not cooked to required minimum temperatures, toxic chemicals stored improperly near food, and employees with no system in place to report illness symptoms. The restaurant was not closed.
The July inspection logged 7 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate violations. That tally is consistent with what inspectors have found at this address in nearly every visit over the past three years.
What Inspectors Found
The undercooking violation is among the most direct hazards an inspector can document. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and a single serving of undercooked chicken can sicken a customer within hours.
The toxic chemical storage violation sits alongside it in severity. Cleaning agents and pesticides stored near or above food preparation areas can contaminate food through spills, aerosols, or mislabeling, and the resulting poisoning can be acute.
Two of the seven high-severity violations involved sick workers. Inspectors found no written employee health policy and documented that employees were not reporting illness symptoms. Those two violations work together: without a policy, there is no mechanism to catch a sick worker before they handle food.
The restaurant also lacked proper shellfish traceability records. Shellfish, including oysters and clams, are frequently consumed raw, and without sourcing documentation, there is no way to trace an outbreak back to a harvest site if customers fall ill. A missing consumer advisory compounds that risk, leaving diners with no written notice that raw or undercooked items carry elevated danger.
Inspectors also cited food contact surfaces not properly cleaned or sanitized, and intermediate violations for improper sewage disposal and inadequate ventilation.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and employees not reporting illness is not a paperwork problem. Food workers are the leading source of Norovirus transmission in restaurant settings, and Norovirus spreads through a single contaminated hand touching a ready-to-eat food. A written policy that requires workers to report symptoms, and a manager trained to act on that report, is the only intervention that breaks that chain before customers are exposed.
The undercooking citation means a customer at Puddle Jumpers received food that had not reached the temperature required to kill pathogens. That is not a near-miss. That is a completed transaction in which a diner ate food the state considers unsafe.
The shellfish traceability gap is a separate but serious thread. Shellfish harvested from contaminated waters carry Vibrio bacteria and hepatitis A. The tagging and record-keeping system exists precisely so that when a cluster of illnesses surfaces, public health officials can identify the harvest location and pull the product. Without those records at Puddle Jumpers, that chain of accountability is broken.
Improperly stored toxic chemicals near food represent a different category of harm entirely, one that does not require bacterial growth or time. A mislabeled container or a spill above a prep surface can cause poisoning in a single meal.
The Longer Record
The July inspection is not an outlier. State records show Puddle Jumpers has been inspected 28 times and has accumulated 353 total violations across that history.
Six of the seven most recent inspections, dating back to April 2022, each produced at least four high-severity violations. The January 2026 inspection, six months before this one, found 8 high-severity violations and 6 intermediate violations, the heaviest single-visit count in the recent record. The only inspection in the current data that found zero high-severity violations was November 2023, a single clean visit sandwiched between an October 2023 inspection with 7 high-severity citations and a December 2024 inspection with 4.
The facility has never been emergency-closed despite that accumulation.
Still Open
The pattern at Puddle Jumpers is not one of a restaurant cycling through isolated bad days. It is a facility that has logged high-severity violations in nearly every documented visit for at least three years, including violations tied to undercooking, sick workers, chemical storage, and food contact sanitation, categories that directly connect to acute illness in customers.
After the July 20 inspection found 7 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate violations, the restaurant remained open.
