MIAMI BEACH, FL. When state inspectors walked into Rakija Lounge at 1131 Collins Ave. on August 10, they found food that could not be traced to any approved or known source, employees who were not reporting illness symptoms, and no one in charge performing managerial duties. The restaurant was not closed.
The inspection produced six high-severity violations and three intermediate ones. Under Florida's food safety framework, high-severity violations are those most directly linked to foodborne illness outbreaks. Rakija Lounge accumulated six of them in a single visit and continued serving customers.
What Inspectors Found
The food-sourcing violation is the kind that draws immediate attention from regulators. When a restaurant cannot identify where its food came from, there is no chain of custody, no USDA or FDA inspection record, and no way to trace an illness back to its origin if a customer gets sick.
Inspectors also cited employees for not reporting illness symptoms, a violation that puts every person who ate at the lounge that day at direct risk. The absence of an active person in charge, the third high-severity citation, compounds both of those problems. Without someone managing the floor, there is no mechanism to catch or correct either failure in real time.
The remaining high-severity violations involved improper handwashing technique, food contact surfaces that were not properly cleaned or sanitized, and no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked menu items. Intermediate violations included improper sewage or wastewater disposal, multi-use utensils that were not properly cleaned, and wiping cloths used incorrectly.
What These Violations Mean
The food from an unapproved or unknown source citation is not a paperwork problem. Food that bypasses the regulated supply chain has not been inspected for Listeria, Salmonella, or E. coli. If a customer becomes ill after eating at Rakija Lounge, health investigators would have no supplier records to trace.
The illness-reporting violation is, by CDC data, the single most direct path to a multi-victim outbreak. Norovirus, which spreads through food handled by infected workers, can move from one sick employee to dozens of customers within a single shift. At Rakija Lounge, inspectors found no system in place to catch that before it happened.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces, cited here as a high-severity violation, create a secondary contamination route. Bacteria transferred from an unsanitized cutting board or prep surface to food does not require a sick employee to reach a customer's plate. Combined with wiping cloths used incorrectly, which can spread pathogens across surfaces rather than remove them, the contamination risk compounds across every station in the kitchen.
The sewage disposal citation adds a separate and acute concern. Improper wastewater handling introduces the risk of fecal contamination in a facility where food is being prepared and served. That violation alone, in many inspection cycles, triggers serious regulatory attention.
The Longer Record
August 10 was not an anomaly. State records show Rakija Lounge has been inspected 30 times and has accumulated 260 total violations across that history. The lounge has never been emergency-closed.
The pattern of high-severity violations stretches back through multiple inspection years. In April 2025, inspectors cited the lounge with 10 high-severity violations in a single visit, the highest single-visit count in the available record. In July 2025, six high-severity violations were documented. In July 2024, six more. The August 10 inspection, with its own six high-severity citations, fits a recurring shape.
The most recent prior inspection, conducted August 11, the day after the violations described here, found two high-severity and one intermediate violation. Whether that reflects corrections made in the 24 hours following the August 10 inspection, or a different set of conditions on a different day, the record does not say.
What the record does say is that across eight documented prior inspections, Rakija Lounge has not had a single visit that came back clean of high-severity violations.
Open for Business
Florida's emergency closure authority is triggered when inspectors determine that conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. On August 10, with food of unknown origin on the premises, employees not reporting illness, no manager on duty, unsanitized food contact surfaces, and improper sewage disposal, inspectors determined that threshold had not been met.
Rakija Lounge remained open that evening. It remained open the next day, when inspectors returned and found two more high-severity violations.
The lounge has 30 inspections on record, 260 violations, and zero emergency closures.
