MELBOURNE, FL. A state inspector walked into Tuscany Grill on Colonnade Avenue on April 21 and found food not cooked to the required minimum temperature, a violation that allows pathogens like Salmonella to survive on the plate and reach the customer.
That was one of eight high-severity violations documented at the Melbourne restaurant that day. The facility was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The inspector cited the restaurant for having no employee health policy and for employees not reporting symptoms of illness. Those two violations exist side by side: there was no written policy requiring workers to disclose when they were sick, and workers were not, in fact, disclosing it.
The inspector also found that the restaurant's use of time as a public health control was improper. Some restaurants substitute time tracking for temperature monitoring, holding food in the danger zone between 41 and 135 degrees for a controlled window before discarding it. When that system is not followed correctly, food sits at temperatures that allow bacterial growth with no temperature record to flag the problem.
Shell stock records were inadequate. Tuscany Grill serves shellfish, which are consumed raw or lightly cooked and carry a heightened contamination risk. Without proper identification tags, there is no way to trace oysters, clams, or mussels back to their harvest source if a customer becomes ill.
The restaurant also had no consumer advisory on the menu for raw or undercooked foods. And the sewage violation, classified as intermediate, added a separate layer of concern to an already lengthy list.
What These Violations Mean
The cooking temperature violation is the most direct threat on this list. Salmonella in poultry requires an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit to be destroyed. Food served below that threshold at Tuscany Grill on April 21 could have carried live pathogens to anyone who ordered it.
The illness reporting failures compound that risk. Norovirus, which causes the majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurants, spreads through direct contact with an infected food worker. Without a written health policy at Tuscany Grill, there was no formal mechanism requiring a sick employee to stay home or report symptoms to a manager. The absence of a person in charge actively performing supervisory duties made enforcement of any informal standard even less likely.
The shellfish traceability failure is a different category of risk. If a customer who ate at Tuscany Grill developed a shellfish-related illness, investigators would have no harvest records to work from. The shell stock tags that accompany legally harvested shellfish are the only chain of evidence linking a plate of oysters to a specific harvest bed, date, and dealer.
The sewage violation means waste water was not being disposed of properly inside the facility. Raw sewage carries fecal bacteria. Its presence in a food preparation environment creates a contamination pathway that touches surfaces, equipment, and hands.
The Pattern
The April 21 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Tuscany Grill has been inspected 18 times and has accumulated 116 total violations across that history.
The February 2 inspection, just ten weeks before this one, produced 12 high-severity violations and 4 intermediate ones. The restaurant passed a follow-up inspection the next day, on February 3, with zero violations. That sequence, a severe inspection followed by a clean bill, followed weeks later by another severe inspection, has repeated itself across the record.
The pattern goes back further. The October 2024 inspection found 3 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate ones. The March 2024 inspection found 5 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate ones. The September 2025 inspection found 4 high-severity violations.
In none of those inspections, and in none of the 18 inspections on record, was Tuscany Grill ever emergency-closed.
The Longer Record
Across eight inspections dating to March 2024, Tuscany Grill has not had a single routine visit that came back clean on the first attempt. The February 3 pass came only after the February 2 inspection flagged 12 high-severity violations and triggered a callback.
The 116 total violations across 18 inspections average out to more than 6 violations per visit. The most recent inspection, with 8 high-severity violations and 1 intermediate, ranks among the worst single-visit tallies in the restaurant's recorded history, second only to the February 2 inspection.
The violations have not been confined to one category. Management failures, illness policy gaps, temperature and time control problems, and shellfish record-keeping issues have appeared across multiple inspection cycles. That breadth, across different inspectors and different visits over more than two years, is what distinguishes a pattern from a bad day.
As of the April 21 inspection, Tuscany Grill on Colonnade Avenue remained open for business.