DORAL, FL. State inspectors walked into Taikin Asian Cuisine at 7450 NW 104th Ave. on August 25 and found food coming from an unapproved or unknown source, a violation that means no federal safety inspection ever touched whatever was being served to customers that day.
The restaurant was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The August 25 inspection produced six high-severity violations and two intermediate ones. Two of the six high-severity citations involved toxic chemicals: inspectors found them improperly stored or labeled in one instance and improperly identified, stored, or used in another. That is two separate chemical-handling failures documented in a single visit.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for not properly cleaning or sanitizing food contact surfaces, a violation that touches every plate, cutting board, and prep surface in the kitchen. Time as a public health control was not properly used, meaning food sat in the temperature danger zone longer than the law allows. And the restaurant had no adequate employee health policy, leaving no formal mechanism to keep sick workers away from food.
The intermediate violations covered multi-use utensils not properly cleaned and wiping cloths used improperly.
What These Violations Mean
The food-from-unapproved-source violation is the one that offers the least room for reassurance. When food bypasses USDA or FDA inspection channels, there is no chain of custody. If a customer gets sick, investigators have nowhere to start tracing the product. The pathogens most associated with this kind of sourcing gap include Listeria and Salmonella, both of which can cause serious illness in healthy adults and can be fatal in elderly or immunocompromised diners.
The two chemical violations compound the picture. Toxic substances stored near or alongside food create a direct contamination pathway. Mislabeled chemicals create a second risk: a worker who cannot identify what a container holds cannot make a safe decision about where to use it or how to dilute it. Both conditions existed at Taikin Asian Cuisine on the same day.
The food contact surface violation means bacteria can transfer from a surface to every item prepared on it. Cutting boards, prep tables, and slicers that are not properly sanitized carry whatever was on them last, including raw protein residue, directly onto the next dish. Combined with the time-abuse violation, where food already sat too long in the temperature range where bacteria double roughly every 20 minutes, the kitchen conditions on August 25 created overlapping contamination risks.
The missing employee health policy matters because it is the first line of defense against a sick worker serving food. Without a written policy, there is no documented protocol requiring an employee with vomiting, diarrhea, or a diagnosed illness like Norovirus to stay home or be reassigned away from food handling. Norovirus alone accounts for roughly 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year, and food workers are a primary transmission route.
The Longer Record
The August 25 inspection was not an aberration. It was, almost exactly, a repeat.
On August 19, 2025, one year and six days earlier, inspectors cited Taikin Asian Cuisine for six high-severity violations and two intermediate violations, the identical count as this month's inspection. The January 2025 visit produced nine high-severity violations and three intermediate ones. The August 2024 inspection also produced nine high-severity violations. The February 2024 visit logged seven high-severity violations.
Across 26 inspections on record, the facility has accumulated 193 total violations. There has never been an emergency closure.
The one inspection that showed zero high-severity violations was the March 31, 2026 visit, which came after a March 11, 2026 inspection that itself cited six high-severity violations. That March-to-March sequence, six violations, then zero, then six again five months later, is the pattern in miniature: the restaurant cleans up for a follow-up and returns to the same violation categories at the next routine inspection.
The July 2023 and February 2024 inspections both produced seven high-severity violations. The category of violations has shifted somewhat across years, but the severity level has not. This is a facility that has logged high-severity citations in every inspection year on record except the single clean follow-up in March 2026.
Still Open
Florida law gives inspectors the authority to order an emergency closure when conditions pose an immediate threat to public health. Six high-severity violations, including food from an unapproved source and two chemical-handling failures, did not meet that threshold on August 25.
Taikin Asian Cuisine was open for business after the inspection.
