ORLANDO, FL. State inspectors walked into Rico Chino Asian Cuisine on S Semoran Boulevard on July 13 and found food sourced from suppliers that have not been approved by state or federal regulators, meaning none of that food had passed USDA or FDA safety screening before reaching customers' plates.
The restaurant logged 12 high-severity violations and 4 intermediate violations during that single inspection. It was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The unapproved food source violation is among the most consequential a restaurant can receive. When food bypasses licensed suppliers, there is no paper trail connecting it to a farm, processor, or distributor. If a customer gets sick, public health investigators cannot trace the source.
Parasite destruction procedures were also not followed. For a restaurant serving Asian cuisine, which commonly features raw or lightly cooked fish, that is not a paperwork failure. Parasites including Anisakis roundworm and tapeworm survive in fish tissue and require either thorough cooking or documented deep-freezing to kill. Without those controls, the parasites reach the customer.
Inspectors also cited food contaminated by chemical, physical, or biological hazards, and toxic chemicals improperly stored or labeled. Those two violations together describe a kitchen where cleaning agents or pesticides were positioned near food, without adequate separation or labeling to prevent accidental contamination.
The restaurant had no written employee health policy and employees were not reporting illness symptoms. Those two violations compound each other. A worker who feels sick has no written guidance telling them to stay home, and no system to report what they are experiencing. Norovirus, the leading cause of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States, spreads most efficiently through exactly that gap.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized. The inspector also noted inadequate shell stock identification records, meaning the restaurant could not demonstrate where its shellfish came from or how it was handled before arriving at the kitchen.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of unapproved food sources and absent parasite destruction controls is worth pausing on. These are not administrative oversights. They describe a kitchen receiving food that no regulator has inspected, preparing it without the freezing or cooking protocols required to neutralize biological hazards inside the protein itself.
The employee illness violations carry a separate and direct risk. Norovirus causes roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food workers are a primary transmission route. When a restaurant has no written health policy and no mechanism for employees to report symptoms, a sick worker preparing food is the predictable result, not an anomaly.
Toxic chemicals stored near food create a different category of danger. Unlike bacterial contamination, chemical poisoning from sanitizers or cleaning agents can cause acute illness within minutes of ingestion. Mislabeled containers make the risk harder to detect and harder to treat.
The consumer advisory violation means customers who ordered raw or undercooked items, dishes that carry elevated risk for Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli, were not informed of that risk. Pregnant women, elderly diners, and anyone with a compromised immune system are most vulnerable. They had no way of knowing they needed to be.
The Longer Record
Rico Chino: High-Severity Violations Over Time
Rico Chino has 33 inspections on record, accumulating 327 total violations across that history. The July 13 inspection was not an outlier.
Every inspection in the prior two years produced at least 4 high-severity violations. The July 2025 inspection produced 13, the highest single-visit count in the recent record. March 2025 produced 10. August 2024 produced 9.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed. Across 33 documented inspections and 327 recorded violations, the state has not ordered Rico Chino off the market for a single day.
The July 13 inspection added 12 more high-severity violations to that record. The restaurant on S Semoran Boulevard was open for business when the inspection concluded.
