MIAMI, FL. In April 2026, state inspectors walked into Silver Palace Chinese Restaurant on SW 137 Avenue and documented food not cooked to required minimum temperatures, toxic chemicals stored improperly near food, and no written policy to keep sick employees out of the kitchen. The restaurant logged 7 high-severity violations and 3 intermediate violations that day. It was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The undercooking violation was the most direct threat to anyone who ate there that day. Inspectors documented that food was not reaching required minimum temperatures, meaning pathogens like Salmonella in poultry can survive the cooking process entirely and reach a customer's plate alive.
The chemical storage violation sat alongside it. Toxic chemicals found improperly stored or unlabeled near food create a contamination risk that can cause acute poisoning, and mislabeled containers mean employees may not recognize the danger before it reaches a dish.
The restaurant also had no written employee health policy. That means no formal mechanism existed to keep a worker sick with Norovirus or another transmissible illness out of the kitchen and away from food preparation.
Inspectors additionally cited improper handwashing technique. The distinction matters: employees were making handwashing attempts, but doing it incorrectly, leaving pathogens on their hands even after washing.
Two more high-severity violations involved shellfish. The restaurant lacked adequate shell stock identification records, meaning inspectors could not trace where oysters, clams, or mussels came from. The restaurant also had no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked foods, leaving elderly diners, pregnant women, and customers with compromised immune systems without the information needed to make an informed choice.
The seventh high-severity citation involved time as a public health control not properly used. When a kitchen relies on time rather than temperature to manage food safety, it must follow strict protocols. The inspector found those protocols were not being followed, meaning food sat in the temperature danger zone without the tracking required to know when it needed to be discarded.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of undercooking and no employee health policy is particularly acute. Undercooking allows pathogens to survive to the plate. A sick employee with no policy barring them from work adds a second, independent route to illness. Both violations were present in the same kitchen on the same day.
The shellfish traceability failure carries a different kind of risk. When someone gets sick from oysters or clams, health investigators trace the illness back through the supply chain to identify the source and prevent more cases. Without shell stock records, that chain breaks immediately. Silver Palace had no such records during the April inspection.
The improper reuse of single-use items, cited as an intermediate violation, compounds the handwashing failure. If gloves, utensils, or other single-use items are being reused, contamination can move from one food or surface to another even when an employee believes they are working cleanly.
The toilet facility violation rounds out a picture of infrastructure neglect. Inadequate restroom facilities discourage proper employee handwashing, which feeds directly back into the handwashing technique violation already cited at the highest severity level.
The Longer Record
The April 14 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Silver Palace has logged 419 total violations across 28 inspections on record, including a prior emergency closure in May 2017 for rodent activity. That closure lasted one day.
The pattern since then has been consistent. In November 2025, inspectors found 7 high-severity violations and 4 intermediate violations, a nearly identical count to April 2026. In April 2025, the tally reached 14 high-severity violations and 7 intermediate violations in a single inspection, the worst single-day record in the facility's recent history. January 2025 brought 6 high-severity violations. May 2024 brought 6 more. March 2024 produced back-to-back inspections on consecutive days, with 5 high-severity violations on March 5 and 9 high-severity violations on March 4.
In October 2022, inspectors found 6 high-severity violations. The categories shift slightly from visit to visit, but the severity counts have remained elevated across every inspection in the available record.
Two days after the April 14 inspection, a follow-up visit on April 16 found 2 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate violations still present. That is an improvement in raw count. It is also the eighth time in recent years that inspectors have left Silver Palace with high-severity citations on the books.
Still Open
After the April 14 inspection, with 7 high-severity violations documented including food not cooked to required temperatures and toxic chemicals near food, Silver Palace Chinese Restaurant remained open to the public.
The follow-up two days later confirmed that not all of those violations had been resolved. Customers who visited in the days between the two inspections had no way of knowing what the inspection record showed.