BRADENTON, FL. A state inspector walked into a Bradenton sushi restaurant on April 28 and found that the establishment could not verify where its fish came from or demonstrate that it had taken any steps to kill parasites before serving raw seafood to customers.
Sushi & Pho on 53rd Avenue East collected six high-severity violations and one intermediate violation during that inspection. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation did not order the restaurant closed.
What Inspectors Found
The two violations most specific to a raw-fish kitchen were the most alarming. Inspectors cited the restaurant for failing to follow parasite destruction procedures and for having food from unapproved or unknown sources. At a sushi restaurant, those two failures compound each other: fish whose origin cannot be verified also cannot be confirmed to have undergone the freezing or cooking protocols that kill parasites.
The parasite destruction citation matters because raw fish served without proper prior freezing can harbor Anisakis worms and tapeworms. Both can survive in sushi-grade fish that has not been held at the correct temperature for the correct duration. A restaurant that also cannot document where its fish was purchased has no chain of custody to trace if a customer falls ill.
The inspector also cited no person in charge present or performing duties, improperly cleaned food contact surfaces, toxic chemicals stored or labeled incorrectly, and employees not reporting illness symptoms. The intermediate violation involved single-use items being reused.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of unknown food sourcing and absent parasite controls is particularly acute at a sushi restaurant. Food from unapproved sources bypasses federal USDA and FDA inspection checkpoints, meaning there is no documentation that the fish arrived cold, was handled safely in transit, or came from a licensed supplier. If a customer became sick, there would be no supplier record to trace.
Parasite destruction is not optional for raw-fish service. Florida food code requires that fish intended for raw consumption be frozen to specific temperatures for specific durations before it reaches a plate. Sushi & Pho's failure to follow those procedures means customers who ordered raw fish on April 28 ate seafood with no documented parasite kill step.
The employee illness reporting violation adds a third layer of direct risk. Norovirus and hepatitis A are transmitted through food handled by sick workers, and both spread rapidly in multi-victim outbreaks. A kitchen without active managerial oversight, which the "no person in charge" citation documents, is a kitchen less likely to catch a sick employee before that worker touches food.
Improperly stored or labeled chemicals near food creates a separate category of acute risk: chemical contamination of food can cause poisoning that is difficult to diagnose quickly because it mimics other illnesses.
The Longer Record
April 28 was not an outlier. The inspection on December 2, 2025 produced an identical tally: six high-severity violations and one intermediate. The inspection on March 21, 2025 produced four high-severity violations and two intermediate ones, and that visit ended with an emergency closure order for roach and rodent activity. The restaurant reopened the following day.
The facility has 37 inspections on record and 205 total violations. It has been emergency-closed five times. Three of those closures were for roach activity, in 2018, 2022, and 2025.
Looking back further, the pattern holds. The inspection on June 25, 2024 found four high-severity violations. The February 2024 visit found three high-severity and three intermediate violations. There is no stretch of recent inspections showing sustained improvement. The March 22, 2025 follow-up after the emergency closure showed zero high-severity violations, but by May 2025 the count was back to four.
The December 2025 inspection, five months before April's visit, was a precise mirror of what inspectors found on April 28: six high-severity, one intermediate. Whatever corrections were made after that inspection did not hold.
The Longer Record in Context
A facility with 37 inspections and 205 violations over its history is not a restaurant that has had a bad stretch. It is a restaurant that has been cited for serious violations repeatedly, closed five times, and returned to high-severity citation counts within months of each corrective inspection.
The five emergency closures place Sushi & Pho in a small category of Florida food establishments. Most restaurants are never emergency-closed. This one has been closed for pest activity three separate times across eight years, with the most recent closure coming in March 2025, thirteen months before the April 28 inspection.
The follow-up inspection on April 29, the day after the six-violation visit, showed zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations. That one-day turnaround is the same pattern that followed the March 2025 emergency closure: a clean bill on the callback, then a return to serious violations at the next unannounced visit.
On April 28, 2026, Sushi & Pho served customers despite having no verified source for its fish, no documented parasite destruction procedures, improperly sanitized food contact surfaces, and no person in charge overseeing any of it. The state did not close it.