POMPANO BEACH, FL. State inspectors walked into Vault at Old Town Pompano on June 23, 2026, and found food contact surfaces that had not been properly cleaned or sanitized, a violation that puts every plate, cutting board, and prep surface in the building on the list of potential contamination vectors. By the time the inspection was complete, the tally stood at six high-severity violations and zero intermediate ones. The facility was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The six violations covered nearly every layer of food safety practice. No person in charge was present, or present but not performing managerial duties. No written employee health policy was in place. Employees were observed using improper handwashing technique.
Food contact surfaces had not been properly cleaned and sanitized. Time was not being used correctly as a public health control for food held outside of safe temperatures. And the menu contained items that could be served raw or undercooked, with no consumer advisory posted to warn diners.
Not a single one of the six violations was categorized below high severity.
What These Violations Mean
The absence of a person in charge is not a paperwork problem. CDC data shows that food service establishments without active managerial oversight accumulate critical violations at three times the rate of those with engaged management on the floor. Every other violation found at Vault on June 23 is easier to explain when no one in authority was watching.
The missing employee health policy compounds that risk directly. Without a written policy requiring sick workers to stay home, a staff member with Norovirus, Hepatitis A, or Salmonella can show up for a shift and no procedure exists to stop them. Norovirus alone accounts for roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food service workers are among its most efficient vectors.
Improper handwashing technique is a violation that surprises some readers, because the assumption is that any handwashing is better than none. It is not. Studies show that incorrect technique, skipping steps, cutting the duration short, or missing parts of the hand, leaves enough pathogens on the skin to transfer to food. At Vault, inspectors found the technique was wrong.
The time-as-public-health-control violation means food was being held in the temperature danger zone, between 41 and 135 degrees, without proper tracking of how long it had been there. When temperature control is replaced with time control, the clock becomes the only safeguard. If no one is logging the time, the safeguard disappears.
The Longer Record
The June 2026 inspection was the sixth on record for Vault at Old Town Pompano. Across those six visits, inspectors have documented 29 total violations. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The pattern in those records is consistent and pointed. The February 2025 inspection produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate, the same high-severity count as June 2026. The July 2025 inspection produced five high-severity violations. December 2025 produced one. The one clean inspection in the set, December 20, 2024, was followed a week later, on December 27, 2024, by a return visit that found one high-severity violation.
This is not a facility with a single bad day on record. Four of its six inspections have produced five or six high-severity violations. The categories shift slightly from visit to visit, but the severity level does not.
The Pattern
What the inspection history shows is a facility that has been cited at the highest severity level on the majority of its inspections since it first appeared in state records, without a single emergency closure to interrupt the cycle.
The June 23 inspection found no manager on duty, no sick-worker policy, improper handwashing, unsanitized food contact surfaces, misused time controls, and no warning for customers about undercooked food on the menu. Six violations, all high severity, all documented by a state inspector.
Vault at Old Town Pompano remained open after that inspection.
