CLERMONT, FL. Back in April 2026, state inspectors walked into Robata Japanese Steakhouse on Oakley Seaver Drive and found food not cooked to required minimum temperatures, toxic chemicals stored improperly near food, and no functioning employee health policy, among 10 high-severity violations total. The restaurant was not closed.
The April 8 inspection produced one of the most serious violation tallies the Clermont steakhouse had seen in recent memory, with 10 high-priority citations and 4 intermediate ones across nearly every layer of food safety practice, from how employees washed their hands to whether shellfish could be traced back to its source.
What Inspectors Found
The most direct threat to anyone who ate there in April was the finding that food was not cooked to required minimum temperatures. For a Japanese steakhouse that serves meat and poultry on a teppanyaki grill, that citation means customers received protein that had not reached the heat level required to kill Salmonella and other pathogens.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled near food. That is not a paperwork problem. Mislabeled or misplaced chemicals near a food prep area create a direct route for contamination, and the consequences can be acute rather than gradual.
The restaurant also had no written employee health policy, meaning there was no documented system for keeping sick workers out of the kitchen. Inspectors additionally cited improper handwashing technique and inadequate handwashing facilities, a combination that means even employees who tried to wash their hands were not doing so effectively, and the infrastructure to support proper hygiene was not in place.
Inspectors also flagged inadequate shell stock identification records. Robata serves seafood, and without proper tagging and documentation for shellfish, there is no way to trace an oyster or clam back to its harvest source if a customer becomes ill.
Food contact surfaces were not properly cleaned or sanitized, and time as a public health control was not being used correctly, meaning food was left in the temperature danger zone without the documentation required to justify that practice.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of undercooked food and improperly stored chemicals is not a cluster of paperwork failures. It is a set of conditions under which a customer could get sick from a pathogen that survived cooking, or from a chemical that found its way into a dish.
The absence of an employee health policy compounds everything else. Without a written policy, there is no mechanism to prevent a worker with Norovirus from handling food. Norovirus is responsible for roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food workers are among the most common transmission vectors.
The handwashing citations at Robata went beyond signage. Inspectors found both inadequate facilities and improper technique, meaning the physical setup and the practice were both deficient. Handwashing is the most basic barrier between a kitchen worker's hands and a customer's plate.
The shellfish traceability violation carries a specific risk for a subset of customers. Raw and lightly cooked shellfish can carry Vibrio bacteria and hepatitis A. When the harvest records are missing, there is no way to identify the source of an outbreak after the fact, and no way to issue a targeted recall.
The Longer Record
The April 2026 inspection did not come out of nowhere. State records show Robata had been inspected 34 times and had accumulated 398 total violations across its history, with no emergency closures on record.
The pattern in the year leading up to April 2026 was consistent. Inspectors found 9 high-severity violations and 4 intermediate ones in April 2025, 7 high-severity violations in October 2025, 7 high-severity violations in December 2024, and 8 high-severity violations in April 2024. The single clean visit in July 2025, which produced zero high-severity violations, stands out against that backdrop as an exception rather than a trend.
Several of the April 2026 violations appeared in prior inspections as well. The absence of a consumer advisory for raw and undercooked foods, the food contact surface sanitation failure, and the temperature control issues all have counterparts in earlier records. A facility that accumulates violations in the same categories across multiple inspection cycles is not encountering these problems for the first time.
The Restaurant Stayed Open
State inspectors documented 10 high-severity violations at Robata on April 8, 2026, including food not cooked to safe temperatures and toxic chemicals stored near food. They did not issue an emergency closure order.
Florida law gives inspectors discretion to close a facility immediately when violations pose an imminent threat to public health. That threshold was not reached, or was not applied, on that visit.
The restaurant was open for business.