MIAMI, FL. An inspector visiting Sushi Maki at 2550 South Bayshore Drive on October 6, 2026 found that the restaurant had no adequate employee health policy and that at least one employee had failed to report symptoms of illness, two violations that state records classify as direct enablers of multi-victim disease outbreaks.
The restaurant was not closed.
Despite six high-severity violations and three intermediate violations documented that day, Sushi Maki remained open and continued serving customers.
What Inspectors Found
The six high-severity violations span nearly every category of food safety risk. Inspectors cited the restaurant for food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, meaning some ingredients had bypassed USDA and FDA inspection entirely before reaching customers' plates.
Inspectors also cited inadequate shell stock identification records. Sushi Maki serves raw and lightly cooked shellfish, and without proper traceability tags on oysters, clams, or mussels, there is no way to identify the harvest source if a customer becomes ill.
Food contact surfaces were found not properly cleaned or sanitized, creating a direct cross-contamination pathway between raw fish and other foods. Multi-use utensils were also cited for improper cleaning at the intermediate level, a violation that state records note allows bacterial biofilms to form within 24 hours.
Improper sewage or wastewater disposal rounded out the intermediate violations, a citation that state records describe as creating a risk of fecal contamination throughout the facility.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and an employee failing to report illness symptoms is, in the language of state inspection records, the number one cause of multi-victim outbreaks. Norovirus spreads through exactly this mechanism: a sick worker with no policy requiring disclosure continues handling food. At a sushi restaurant, where much of the food is served raw or minimally processed, that pathway is shorter and more direct than in a kitchen where food is cooked to high temperatures.
The food from unapproved sources violation carries a separate and compounding risk. When an ingredient enters a restaurant without passing through licensed, inspected distribution channels, there is no paper trail. If a customer reports illness and investigators need to trace the source, that chain of custody simply does not exist.
The shellfish traceability failure makes the raw-food risk more concrete. State law requires that shellfish tags be retained and matched to specific batches, precisely because bivalves are filter feeders that concentrate bacteria and viruses from surrounding water. Without those records at Sushi Maki on October 6, the harvest location, harvest date, and dealer certification for any shellfish served that day cannot be confirmed.
Improper handwashing technique, also cited as a high-severity violation, does not mean employees skipped handwashing entirely. It means the technique used was inadequate to remove pathogens, a distinction that matters because it can create a false sense of compliance while the contamination pathway remains open.
The Longer Record
The October 2026 inspection was not an outlier. State records show Sushi Maki has been inspected 22 times and has accumulated 181 violations across its inspection history.
Of the eight prior inspections for which violation data is available, seven resulted in high-severity citations. The November 2025 inspection produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate, a count identical to October 2026. The February 2024 inspection produced five high-severity and three intermediate violations. The pattern of four to six high-severity violations per visit has repeated across inspections in 2023, 2024, 2025, and now 2026.
The restaurant has never been emergency-closed, according to state records.
The single inspection without high-severity violations, in April 2024, stands as the exception across a three-year window. Every other documented inspection in that period found multiple high-severity violations, in several cases including the same categories: food sourcing, shellfish traceability, and employee illness protocols.
Still Open
State inspectors documented the shellfish traceability failure, the unknown food source, the absent illness policy, the unreported employee symptoms, the unsanitized food contact surfaces, and the improper handwashing technique on October 6, 2026.
Sushi Maki was not closed.
The restaurant, which sits inside a suite at one of Miami's most prominent waterfront addresses, continued operating after the inspection concluded. Customers who ate there that week had no way of knowing that the person preparing their raw fish had not been required to disclose whether they were sick, that the shellfish on the menu could not be traced to a verified harvest source, and that the surfaces used to prepare their food had not been properly sanitized.
State records show that is not a new situation at this address. It is the established one.
