SAINT AUGUSTINE, FL. State inspectors found food from unapproved or unknown sources inside Simone's Wood Fired Craft Kitchen at 185 Murabella Parkway on April 29, and the restaurant kept its doors open.
That single violation, one of seven high-severity citations documented during the visit, means food served to customers that day had bypassed USDA and FDA safety inspections. If that food was contaminated with Listeria or Salmonella, there would be no supply chain record to trace it back to the source.
What Inspectors Found
The April 29 inspection produced eight violations in total: seven high-severity and one intermediate. The high-severity list covered nearly every category that food safety regulators consider most dangerous.
Inspectors cited the restaurant for failing to follow parasite destruction procedures, a violation that applies when fish or pork is served raw or undercooked without the required freezing protocols designed to kill Anisakis, tapeworm, and Trichinella. The restaurant also had no consumer advisory posted to warn diners that raw or undercooked items carry elevated risk, which means customers with compromised immune systems, pregnant women, and the elderly were making menu choices without that information.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled near food areas. Food contact surfaces, the cutting boards, prep tables, and equipment that touches what customers eat, had not been properly cleaned and sanitized.
Then there were the two violations that, taken together, describe a kitchen with no systemic defense against a sick employee infecting the food supply: no written employee health policy, and at least one employee not reporting illness symptoms to management.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and an employee not reporting illness symptoms is how Norovirus outbreaks start. Norovirus is responsible for the majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurant settings in the United States. A single sick food worker touching ready-to-eat food can infect dozens of customers. A written health policy is the mechanism that tells employees when to stay home and gives management the authority to enforce it. Without one, there is no standard, and no record that the standard was ever communicated.
The unapproved food source violation is distinct from the others because it cannot be corrected by cleaning or cooking. Food that enters a kitchen from an unknown or unapproved supplier has no documentation of where it was raised, processed, or inspected. If a customer gets sick from that food, investigators have no supply chain to follow.
Parasite destruction failures matter most at a wood-fired restaurant where fish and specialty proteins are central to the menu concept. Proper parasite destruction requires specific freezing temperatures held for specific durations before fish is served raw or undercooked. Skipping that step means Anisakis larvae, which can embed in the stomach lining and cause severe abdominal pain, may survive to the plate.
The toxic chemical storage violation adds a separate and unrelated risk: acute chemical contamination of food through mislabeled containers or improper proximity to food prep areas.
The Longer Record
The April 29 inspection was not an aberration. State records show Simone's Wood Fired Craft Kitchen has been inspected 13 times in total, accumulating 97 violations across that history.
The pattern of high-severity violations at this location goes back to at least 2022. Inspectors documented four high-severity violations in December 2022, seven in August 2023, eight in October 2023, seven in August 2024, and six in June 2025. The June 2025 inspection was followed four days later by a clean visit with zero violations, a pattern that also appeared in December 2025, when a December 2 inspection with four high-severity violations was followed by a December 10 visit showing none.
That cycle, a high-violation inspection followed quickly by a clean one, appears at least twice in the facility's record. What it does not show is a sustained period without serious violations. The restaurant has never been emergency-closed.
The April 29 inspection, with seven high-severity violations, matches the facility's worst single-day totals on record. It is not the first time inspectors have found this many serious problems in one visit. It is at least the fourth.
Open for Business
State inspectors left Simone's Wood Fired Craft Kitchen on April 29 with seven high-severity violations documented and the restaurant still serving customers. The violations included food from an unverifiable source, no mechanism to keep sick employees out of the kitchen, unsanitized food contact surfaces, improperly stored chemicals, and no warning to diners about raw or undercooked menu items.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in 13 inspections spanning more than three years.