BRADENTON, FL. A state inspector walked into Sushi Kami Endless Japanese Fusion on Ranch Lake Boulevard on May 14 and found no documentation that the raw fish being served to customers had ever been frozen to kill parasites — a foundational requirement for any restaurant serving raw or undercooked seafood.
That was one of ten high-severity violations cited that day. The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The parasite-destruction failure is the sharpest of the ten. Raw fish served as sushi or sashimi must be frozen to specific temperatures for specific durations before it reaches a customer's plate, a process designed to kill Anisakis worms and other parasites. No documentation of that process was on hand.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for sourcing food from unapproved or unknown suppliers. Food that bypasses licensed distributors carries no paper trail, meaning if a customer gets sick, there is no way to trace the product back through the supply chain.
Shellfish records were also missing. Oysters, clams, and mussels must be accompanied by shellstock identification tags that show where they were harvested and when. Without those tags, there is no way to connect a sick customer to a contaminated harvest lot.
Customers were not warned. The restaurant had no consumer advisory posted, the notice that is legally required to inform diners, particularly pregnant women, elderly patrons, and people with compromised immune systems, that they are eating raw or undercooked food.
The remaining six high-severity violations covered a wide range of failures: food found in poor condition or mislabeled; food contact surfaces that were not properly cleaned or sanitized; toxic chemicals stored or labeled improperly near food; no written employee health policy; no qualified person in charge present or performing their duties; and employees using improper handwashing technique.
Three intermediate violations rounded out the inspection: improper sewage or wastewater disposal, multi-use utensils not properly cleaned, and single-use items being reused.
What These Violations Mean
The parasite-destruction and unapproved-source violations are the two that most directly affect anyone who ate at Sushi Kami before May 14. Anisakis, the most common fish parasite in raw seafood, causes severe abdominal pain and can require surgical removal if it embeds in the stomach lining. The required freeze protocol kills it. Without documentation that the protocol was followed, there is no way to know whether it was.
Food from unapproved sources compounds that risk. Licensed distributors are inspected and traceable. Unknown sources are not. If a customer becomes ill from a product that entered the kitchen through an unlicensed channel, investigators have no starting point.
The missing consumer advisory is a separate but serious failure. Sushi restaurants are required to disclose the risks of raw consumption precisely because the customers most at risk, the elderly, the immunocompromised, and the pregnant, may not know they are eating food that has not been fully cooked. That disclosure was absent.
The absence of a person in charge performing their duties ties many of the other violations together. CDC data shows that establishments without active managerial control accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of those that have it. The inspection record at Sushi Kami on May 14 is consistent with that finding.
The Longer Record
The May 14 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show 25 inspections on file for Sushi Kami, with 245 total violations accumulated across that history.
The pattern is persistent. Inspectors found 6 high-severity violations in January 2023, another 6 in October 2023, and 5 in February 2024. The restaurant had a clean inspection in December 2025, logging zero high-severity or intermediate violations, which makes the ten-violation return in May 2026 more striking, not less.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed in its inspection history. That record remains intact after May 14.
Open for Business
The violations documented on May 14 included failures at nearly every layer of food safety: sourcing, storage, preparation, sanitation, staffing, and disclosure. Thirteen citations in total, ten of them high-severity.
State inspectors did not order the restaurant closed.
Sushi Kami Endless Japanese Fusion on Ranch Lake Boulevard was open when the inspector left.