ORLANDO, FL. An inspector visiting Taste of Chengdu on New Broad Street on April 22 found food sourced from unapproved or unknown suppliers, meaning no USDA or FDA safety inspection had ever touched it, and the restaurant was allowed to remain open.
That single violation sat alongside five other high-severity citations and two intermediate ones, a total of eight violations logged in a single visit to the Sichuan restaurant at 4856 New Broad St.
What Inspectors Found
The food sourcing violation is among the most serious a restaurant can receive. When food arrives from an unapproved or unidentified supplier, there is no inspection record, no traceability, and no way for health officials to trace an illness back to its origin if customers get sick.
Inspectors also cited the restaurant for employees not reporting symptoms of illness and for having no written employee health policy. Those two violations work together: without a policy requiring workers to disclose when they are sick, and without workers actually doing so, a contagious employee can move through a kitchen shift without anyone stopping them.
The improper handwashing technique citation compounded the illness risk further. Even when an employee does wash their hands, the wrong technique leaves pathogens behind. Combined with unreported illness and no health policy, the kitchen on April 22 had no reliable barrier between a sick worker and a customer's plate.
Toxic substances were also found to be improperly identified, stored, or used, a violation that creates immediate chemical contamination risk. And the restaurant was cited for failing to properly use time as a public health control, meaning food was allowed to sit in the temperature danger zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, without adequate tracking of how long it had been there.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and employees not reporting illness symptoms is what state and federal investigators consistently identify as the primary driver of multi-victim outbreaks. Norovirus, which causes the majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurant settings, spreads through exactly this mechanism: a worker who does not know they are required to report symptoms, or who chooses not to, handles food and infects dozens of customers before anyone connects the cases.
The unapproved food source violation adds a separate and distinct risk. Food that bypasses USDA and FDA inspection can harbor Listeria, Salmonella, or E. coli without any prior detection. If a customer becomes ill after eating at Taste of Chengdu and investigators need to trace the ingredient, an unapproved supplier may be impossible to identify or contact.
Improperly cleaned multi-use utensils develop bacterial biofilms within 24 hours. Those biofilms are resistant to standard cleaning and can transfer bacteria to every dish the utensil touches. The wiping cloth violation adds to this: cloths used across multiple surfaces without proper sanitation carry contamination from one area of the kitchen to another, turning a localized problem into a kitchen-wide one.
None of these violations are obscure or technical. They are foundational food safety practices, and all six high-severity citations were present in the same kitchen on the same day.
The Longer Record
Taste of Chengdu: Inspection History
April 22 was not an unusually bad day for Taste of Chengdu. It was the continuation of a pattern that has been building since at least 2022.
The restaurant has accumulated 77 violations across 14 inspections on record. High-severity violations have appeared in every single inspection in that history. The counts have not trended down. They have trended up: from one or two high-severity violations per visit in late 2022 and early 2023, to three in 2024, to five in September 2024, to six in November 2025, and six again in April 2026.
The November 2025 inspection, five months before this one, also produced six high-severity violations. The restaurant was not closed then either.
There have been no emergency closures in the facility's inspection history.
Taste of Chengdu on New Broad Street served customers on April 22, 2026, the same day an inspector documented food from an unknown source, no policy for sick workers, employees not reporting illness, and improper handwashing technique in its kitchen.