OAKLAND PARK, FL. A state inspector walked into Rebel Wine Bar at 3520 NE 12 Ave on June 18 and found food that had not been cooked to the minimum required temperature, a violation that state records flag as a direct pathway for pathogens like Salmonella to survive and reach a customer's plate. The restaurant was not closed.
That single finding was one of six high-severity violations documented during the inspection. The facility recorded zero intermediate violations alongside those six, meaning every single citation issued that day sat at the highest level of concern on the state's scale.
What Inspectors Found
The cooking temperature violation sits at the core of the June 18 report. State code sets minimum internal temperatures for a reason: heat is the last line of defense between a pathogen and a customer. When food doesn't reach that threshold, the defense fails.
Inspectors also cited food in poor condition, mislabeled, or adulterated. That category covers a range of serious problems, from spoilage to contamination to products that cannot be traced or identified accurately.
Food contact surfaces, the cutting boards, prep tables, and utensils that touch what customers eat, were documented as not properly cleaned or sanitized. Surfaces like those are a primary transfer point for bacteria moving from one food to another.
Then there were the handwashing violations, two of them. Inspectors cited both inadequate handwashing by food employees and improper hand and arm washing technique. Those are two distinct problems: one is a failure to wash at all, or to wash often enough; the other is a failure to wash correctly even when the attempt is made.
The sixth violation was the absence of an adequate employee health policy.
What These Violations Mean
The cooking temperature citation is among the most consequential a restaurant can receive. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. Ground beef can harbor E. coli at internal temperatures below 155 degrees. When a kitchen sends undercooked food to a table, it is sending whatever pathogens were present in the raw product directly to the customer. There is no secondary safeguard once the plate leaves the kitchen.
The two handwashing violations compound that risk in a specific way. Studies show that proper handwashing removes more than 99 percent of transient pathogens from skin. Improper technique, washing too briefly, skipping the wrist and forearm, or failing to use soap, leaves that protection incomplete. At Rebel Wine Bar on June 18, inspectors found both that employees were not washing adequately and that the technique used when washing occurred was wrong. That is a layered failure at the most basic point of contamination control.
The absence of an employee health policy matters in a different but connected way. Without a written policy, a worker who comes in sick, with Norovirus, for example, has no formal instruction to stay home or to report symptoms to a manager. Norovirus is responsible for roughly 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year. A single sick employee handling food without a health policy in place is a direct transmission route.
Food contact surfaces that are not properly sanitized turn every prep task into a potential cross-contamination event. A cutting board used for raw protein and inadequately cleaned before the next use transfers whatever was on that protein to whatever comes next.
The Longer Record
Rebel Wine Bar has eight inspections on record with the state, accumulating 23 total violations across that history. Prior to June 18, the facility had never been emergency-closed.
The inspection history shows a facility that had, in recent years, kept its high-severity citation count low. The May 2025 visit produced zero violations at any level. The September 2025 inspection found one high-severity violation. The January 2025 and August 2024 visits each produced a single high-severity citation.
That pattern makes June 18 a significant departure. In every one of the seven prior inspections on record, the facility received at most one high-severity violation in a single visit. On June 18, it received six.
The July 2021 inspection also found zero violations. The earliest inspection with any high-severity citation on record, from June 2024, found one high and one intermediate. Nothing in the prior record approaches the density of what inspectors documented this month.
Open for Business
Florida's emergency closure authority is triggered when an inspector determines that conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. Six high-severity violations at Rebel Wine Bar on June 18, including undercooked food, unsanitized food contact surfaces, and two separate handwashing failures, did not result in that determination.
The restaurant was not closed. It remained open after the inspection.
State records do not indicate whether a callback inspection has been scheduled or completed. As of the data available for this report, the six high-severity violations documented on June 18 stand as the facility's most serious single-day inspection result in its recorded history.