STUART, FL. Employees at a downtown Stuart restaurant were serving food from improperly cleaned surfaces with no written illness policy in place and no consumer warning posted about raw or undercooked items, according to state inspection records from July 8.
Spritz City Bistro at 61 SW Osceola St drew seven high-severity violations during that inspection and zero intermediate ones. The restaurant was not emergency-closed.
What Inspectors Found
The illness-related violations stand out as the most direct threat to customers. Inspectors cited the restaurant for having no employee health policy, and separately for employees not reporting symptoms of illness. Those are two distinct failures that together describe a kitchen with no mechanism for keeping a sick worker away from food.
The shellfish violation adds another layer of risk. Inspectors found inadequate shell stock identification or records, meaning the restaurant could not document where its oysters, clams, or mussels came from.
Two more violations involved food safety controls that were either absent or improperly applied. Food contact surfaces, the cutting boards, prep tables, and utensils that touch food directly, were not properly cleaned and sanitized. And inspectors cited the restaurant for misusing time as a public health control, a method that allows food to sit in the temperature danger zone only under strict written procedures that were apparently not being followed here.
Finally, there was no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked foods, and no person in charge was present or actively performing supervisory duties.
What These Violations Mean
The pair of illness-policy violations is where the risk is most acute. Without a written employee health policy, there is no formal system requiring workers to disclose symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, or jaundice before handling food. When that policy is also not being followed in practice, as the separate "not reporting symptoms" citation indicates, a sick employee can move through an entire shift without anyone intervening. Norovirus, the leading cause of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurant settings, spreads through exactly that route.
The shellfish traceability failure is a different kind of danger. Oysters, clams, and mussels are typically consumed raw or barely cooked, and they are among the most common vehicles for Vibrio and hepatitis A. The shell stock tag system exists so that, if customers get sick, investigators can trace the product back to a specific harvest bed and pull it from circulation. Without those records at Spritz City Bistro, that chain of accountability breaks.
The food contact surface violation matters because improperly sanitized prep surfaces transfer bacteria from one food to the next, particularly in a kitchen handling raw shellfish alongside ready-to-eat items.
The misuse of time as a public health control is a procedural failure with real consequences. When a kitchen uses time rather than temperature to keep food safe, it is operating under a narrow set of rules: food must be marked, tracked, and discarded within a defined window. Inspectors found those controls were not properly in place, meaning food may have sat in the bacterial growth range of 41 to 135 degrees for an undocumented period.
The Longer Record
Spritz City Bistro: Recent Inspection History
The July 8 inspection is not an isolated bad day. State records show 37 inspections on file for this location, with 202 total violations accumulated across that history. Every inspection in the past two years for which high-severity data is available has produced at least three high-priority citations.
The restaurant was emergency-closed on April 30, 2024, after inspectors found roach and fly activity. It reopened the following day. Two months later, in July 2024, it drew four more high-severity violations.
The pattern through 2025 held. Four high violations in September, four more in October. The February 2025 inspection produced five high violations and one intermediate. The one clean inspection in that stretch, July 2, 2024, came the day after a four-violation visit, suggesting it was a follow-up confirmation rather than a routine call.
July 8, 2026 produced the highest single-inspection high-severity count in the recent record: seven, with no intermediates. The restaurant was not closed.
