MELBOURNE, FL. A state inspector walked into a Melbourne pizza restaurant in July and found food sourced from an unapproved or unknown supplier, no written policy requiring sick employees to report their symptoms, and evidence that at least one employee had not reported illness symptoms at all. Slices Pizza and Italian Kitchen on West Eau Gallie Boulevard collected six high-severity violations and one intermediate violation during the July 20 inspection. The restaurant was not closed.
The six high-severity citations placed this inspection among the most serious in the restaurant's recorded history, matching a nearly identical result from September 2024.
What Inspectors Found
The food sourcing violation is the kind that gives outbreak investigators nightmares. When food enters a restaurant through an unapproved or unverified supplier, it has bypassed the USDA and FDA inspection systems that exist specifically to catch contamination before it reaches a kitchen. If someone gets sick, traceback investigations depend on supplier records. Without them, the chain of evidence breaks.
The cooking temperature violation compounded the sourcing problem. Food that arrives from an unknown origin and is then undercooked has cleared none of the safety checkpoints designed to eliminate pathogens.
The sewage disposal violation, classified as intermediate, added a separate contamination pathway. Improper wastewater disposal can spread fecal contamination through a facility, and the citation was recorded alongside the food-contact surface sanitation failure, meaning inspectors found both a direct contamination risk and surfaces that were not being properly cleaned.
What These Violations Mean
The pairing of no employee health policy and an employee who had not reported illness symptoms is what epidemiologists point to when explaining how Norovirus spreads through a dining room. Norovirus, which causes the majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurant settings, spreads through direct contact with an infected food handler. A written health policy is the first line of defense because it creates a documented expectation that sick workers stay home. Without one, there is no formal system for a manager to enforce.
The employee illness citation goes further. It means the inspector found evidence that a worker was symptomatic and had not disclosed it. That is not a paperwork failure. That is a direct transmission risk to every customer served during that shift.
The consumer advisory violation is narrower in scope but matters for a specific group of customers. Pregnant women, elderly diners, and people with compromised immune systems face elevated danger from raw or undercooked proteins. A consumer advisory on the menu is the mechanism that lets those customers make an informed choice. Without it, they have no warning.
The combination of improperly sanitized food-contact surfaces and undercooked food means two of the most basic pathogen barriers in any kitchen were not functioning on the same day. Cutting boards and prep surfaces that are not properly sanitized between uses transfer bacteria from one food item to the next. When the food being prepared is also not reaching required internal temperatures, neither the surface sanitation step nor the cooking step is eliminating the risk.
The Longer Record
The July 2026 inspection was the 27th on record for Slices Pizza and Italian Kitchen, and the restaurant has accumulated 117 total violations across that history. It has never been emergency-closed.
The inspection history shows a facility that cycles between clean reports and serious ones. The restaurant passed its November 2024 inspection with zero violations at any severity level, then returned six high-severity violations in September 2024, just two months earlier. That September 2024 inspection also produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate, an exact structural match to the July 2026 result.
The January 2026 inspection, the most recent before this one, found one high-severity violation. The August 2025 visit found zero high-severity violations. The pattern is not one of steady decline or steady improvement. It is a facility that can pass an inspection and then, months later, produce a citation list that includes food from an unknown source and an employee failing to report illness.
The two inspections with six high-severity violations each, September 2024 and July 2026, are the worst on record. The restaurant has shown it can correct enough to pass. It has also shown that the corrections do not hold.
Still Open
State inspectors documented seven violations on July 20, six of them classified as high-severity, including food entering the kitchen from a supplier that could not be verified and a worker who had not reported symptoms of illness to management.
Slices Pizza and Italian Kitchen on West Eau Gallie Boulevard was not closed. It remained open for business.
