KEY LARGO, FL. Food workers at a popular waterfront restaurant were not reporting illness symptoms to management, inspectors found in April, a lapse that federal health officials identify as the single leading cause of multi-victim foodborne outbreaks.
State inspectors visited Skippers Dockside on Caribbean Drive on April 24 and documented seven high-severity violations and one intermediate violation. The restaurant was not emergency-closed.
What Inspectors Found
The illness-reporting failure was not the only concern. Inspectors also cited the restaurant for having no written employee health policy at all, meaning there was no formal system requiring workers to disclose symptoms before handling food.
Employees were also observed not washing their hands adequately. On top of that, the physical handwashing infrastructure itself was cited as inadequate, a compounding problem: workers cannot wash their hands properly if the facilities to do so are not in place.
Food contact surfaces were not being properly cleaned and sanitized. Toxic chemicals were improperly stored or labeled near the food operation. And the person in charge was either not present or not performing managerial duties during the inspection.
What These Violations Mean
The illness-reporting and health policy violations are among the most consequential a food service inspection can document. CDC data attributes food workers who show up sick as the leading cause of restaurant-linked outbreaks. Norovirus alone infects an estimated 20 million Americans annually, and a single symptomatic employee handling food or surfaces can expose dozens of customers in a single shift. At Skippers Dockside, inspectors found not only that workers were not reporting symptoms, but that no written policy existed requiring them to do so.
The handwashing violations operate together in a way that makes each worse. Inadequate technique is a serious problem on its own. But when the physical facilities for handwashing are also deficient, the failure is structural, not just behavioral. Inspectors flagged both at Skippers Dockside on the same visit.
Improperly cleaned food contact surfaces create a direct transfer route for bacteria between raw and ready-to-eat items. Cutting boards, prep tables, and slicing equipment that are not sanitized between uses can carry pathogens from one food item to the next without any visible sign of contamination.
The chemical storage violation adds a separate and acute risk. Cleaning agents and sanitizers stored near or above food, or without proper labeling, can cause poisoning through direct contamination or through mislabeled containers being mistaken for food-safe products.
The Longer Record
The April 24 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Skippers Dockside has been inspected 22 times and has accumulated 214 total violations across its history.
The pattern of high-severity violations is consistent across years. In April 2025, inspectors documented 11 high-severity violations and one intermediate on a single visit, followed by a return visit the next day that still found one high-severity violation. In December 2024, the restaurant drew six high-severity violations. In March 2024, another six high-severity violations. In July 2023, six more.
The December 2025 inspection found eight high-severity violations. The February 2026 visit, just two months before the April inspection, found two high-severity violations. None of these inspections resulted in an emergency closure.
In total, the last eight inspections on record have each included between one and eleven high-severity violations. There is no inspection in that stretch that returned zero high-severity findings.
Still Open
State inspectors have the authority to order an emergency closure when conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. The combination of illness-reporting failures, no health policy, handwashing deficiencies, unsanitized food contact surfaces, and improperly stored chemicals documented on April 24 did not trigger that order.
Skippers Dockside, which sits on the water in Key Largo and draws both local and tourist traffic in one of Florida's busiest recreational corridors, remained open following the inspection.
The seven high-severity violations cited on April 24 represent the second-highest single-visit total in the restaurant's recent inspection history, behind only the 11 found in April 2025.
It was the restaurant's 22nd inspection on record. The violation count across all those visits now stands at 214.