MIAMI BEACH, FL. Back in April 2026, a state inspector walked into a Subway sandwich shop on the MacArthur Causeway and found that some of the food being served to customers had come from unapproved or unknown sources, meaning it had bypassed federal safety inspections entirely.
That was one of ten high-severity violations documented at Subway 28842, Inc. at 980 MacArthur Causeway during the April 17 inspection. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The full list from that April 17 visit reads like a cascade of failures. Inspectors cited improper handwashing technique, meaning employees were going through the motions of washing their hands without actually removing pathogens. Food was not being cooked to required minimum temperatures.
Toxic chemicals were improperly stored or labeled, and a separate citation covered toxic substances improperly identified, stored, or used. Those are two distinct chemical-handling violations at the same location on the same day.
Time as a public health control was not being properly applied, and there was no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked foods. Food contact surfaces had not been properly cleaned or sanitized. Two intermediate violations covered multi-use utensils and inadequate ventilation and lighting.
No person in charge was present or performing duties during the inspection.
What These Violations Mean
The food-from-unapproved-sources violation is the one that most directly removes a safety net most customers assume exists. When food enters a restaurant through channels that bypass USDA or FDA inspection, there is no traceability if someone gets sick. Investigators cannot trace an outbreak back to a contaminated batch if the batch was never logged in a regulated supply chain.
The employee illness-reporting failure compounds that risk in a direct way. Norovirus, which causes the majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States, spreads person-to-person through food handlers who are symptomatic but working. An employee who is not required to report symptoms, or who does not know they are required to, is a direct transmission route to every customer served that shift.
Undercooking adds a third layer. Salmonella in poultry survives below 165 degrees Fahrenheit. At a sandwich shop where chicken is a primary protein, a failure to reach minimum cooking temperatures is not a paperwork problem.
The two chemical violations at this location deserve attention on their own. Improperly stored or mislabeled cleaning chemicals near food preparation surfaces can cause acute poisoning through direct contamination. The fact that inspectors wrote two separate citations for chemical handling on the same visit suggests the problem was not limited to a single misplaced bottle.
The Longer Record
Subway 28842 Inspection History
This location has 12 inspections on record and 77 total violations accumulated across those visits. The April 17 inspection was not an anomaly. It was the worst single inspection in the facility's documented history, but it arrived after years of recurring high-severity citations.
The September 2025 inspection turned up four high-severity violations. The August 2024 inspection produced three high-severity violations. November 2021 brought four high-severity violations and three intermediate ones. The only inspection in the record that produced zero high-severity citations was January 2022.
The facility has never been emergency-closed. Across all 12 inspections, regulators have not once determined that conditions at this MacArthur Causeway Subway required pulling customers out of line and locking the doors.
On April 20, three days after the ten-violation inspection, an inspector returned and found one high-severity violation and one intermediate violation. The restaurant had been open and serving customers in the days between.