DELAND, FL. Food workers at Village Cafe on Orange Camp Road were not required to report symptoms of illness when state inspectors visited on April 20, because the restaurant had no written employee health policy in place, one of six high-severity violations inspectors documented that day.
The cafe at 1431 Orange Camp Road, Suite 106 was not emergency-closed. It remained open to the public.
What Inspectors Found
The April 20 inspection produced nine violations in total, six of them high-severity. The complete list reads like a breakdown of nearly every basic food safety system a restaurant is supposed to maintain.
No person in charge was present or performing duties during the inspection. No employee health policy existed. Employees were not reporting illness symptoms. Handwashing by food employees was inadequate. Shell stock identification records were missing or insufficient. And parasite destruction procedures for fish or other at-risk proteins were not being followed.
Three intermediate violations accompanied those six. Inspectors cited improper sewage or wastewater disposal, multi-use utensils not properly cleaned, and improper use of wiping cloths.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and no illness reporting is particularly significant. Without a written policy requiring workers to disclose symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, or jaundice before handling food, a restaurant has no formal mechanism to keep a sick employee out of the kitchen. Norovirus, which causes roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States annually, spreads readily through food contact from an infected worker. Village Cafe had neither the policy nor the reporting practice in place.
The parasite destruction violation involves a separate but serious risk. Certain fish, pork, and wild game must be frozen at specific temperatures for specific periods before serving, or cooked to temperatures that kill parasites including Anisakis and Trichinella. When those procedures are not followed, live parasites can survive into a finished dish. The shellfish traceability failure compounds the picture: without proper shell stock identification records, there is no way to trace oysters, clams, or mussels back to their harvest source if a customer becomes ill.
Inadequate handwashing is not a paperwork problem. It is the most direct contamination route in a food service environment, and inspectors flagged it here alongside improperly cleaned multi-use utensils, which can develop bacterial biofilms within 24 hours of inadequate cleaning. Those biofilms protect bacteria from standard sanitizers.
The sewage or wastewater disposal violation sits underneath all of this. Improper handling of sewage creates the risk of fecal contamination spreading through a facility, and it was present on the same day inspectors found workers were not washing their hands adequately.
The Longer Record
The April 2026 inspection was not an anomaly. State records show Village Cafe has been inspected 23 times, accumulating 141 total violations across that history, with no prior emergency closures.
High-severity violations have appeared in nearly every recent inspection. In August 2023, inspectors found seven high-severity violations and two intermediate ones, the worst single-visit count in the recent record. The February 2023 visit produced three high and two intermediate violations. The September 2024 inspection found four high and two intermediate. The January 2024 inspection found four high violations.
The only clean inspection in the available record came in August 2022, when inspectors documented zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations. Every visit since has produced high-severity citations.
The April 2026 inspection ties the August 2025 visit for the second-highest high-severity count in recent years, behind only the seven recorded in August 2023. The pattern is not one of occasional lapses. It is a facility that has logged high-severity violations in seven of its last eight documented inspections.
Open for Business
State inspectors have the authority to order an emergency closure when violations pose an immediate threat to public health. After the April 20 inspection, with six high-severity violations on the books including the absence of any employee illness policy, inadequate handwashing, and improper parasite destruction procedures, they did not exercise that authority.
Village Cafe remained open.