TAMPA, FL. A state inspection of Wandee Asian Fusion on Memorial Highway on September 2 turned up toxic chemicals stored improperly near food, no shellfish traceability records, and unsanitized food contact surfaces, among six total high-severity violations. The restaurant was not closed.
The six high-severity citations place the September inspection among the worst in the facility's documented history. Inspectors also noted one intermediate violation for inadequate ventilation and lighting.
What Inspectors Found
The chemical storage violation is the most acutely dangerous finding in the report. Toxic chemicals stored near or improperly labeled in a food-service environment can contaminate food directly, and mislabeled containers create a secondary risk: a worker reaching for a cleaning product in a rush may grab something far more dangerous.
The shellfish records violation compounds a different kind of risk. Wandee Asian Fusion serves shellfish, and state law requires restaurants to maintain shell stock identification tags so that any oyster, clam, or mussel can be traced back to its harvest location and date. Without those records, if a customer becomes ill, investigators have no way to determine the source.
Food contact surfaces, including cutting boards and prep equipment, were found not properly cleaned or sanitized. That means whatever bacteria or allergen residue remained on those surfaces had a direct path to the next dish prepared on them.
The restaurant also had no consumer advisory posted for raw or undercooked foods, no written employee health policy, and inadequate handwashing facilities. Those three violations together describe a kitchen where sick employees have no formal instruction to stay home, no reliable place to wash their hands, and where customers with compromised immune systems receive no warning about the risks of raw preparations.
What These Violations Mean
The employee health policy violation is not a paperwork problem. Without a written policy, there is no formal mechanism to keep a worker with Norovirus or Salmonella off the line. Norovirus alone accounts for roughly 20 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States annually, and direct transmission from an infected food handler is one of the most documented routes.
The handwashing infrastructure citation makes the employee health issue worse. A policy that tells workers to wash their hands means nothing if the facilities to do so are inadequate. These two violations, documented together at Wandee on September 2, describe a kitchen where the most basic disease-prevention chain is broken at two links simultaneously.
The shellfish traceability failure carries a specific legal and public health weight. Shellfish harvested from contaminated waters are a known vector for Hepatitis A and Vibrio infections. The tag system exists precisely because shellfish illnesses can take days to appear, by which time a restaurant without records cannot help investigators determine whether the product was safe at the point of harvest.
Improperly stored toxic chemicals represent the most immediate acute risk in the report. Chemical contamination of food does not require a pathogen and does not take days to cause harm. It can happen in a single service.
The Longer Record
The September 2 inspection is not an outlier. State records show Wandee Asian Fusion has been inspected 33 times and has accumulated 307 total violations across its history. The facility has been cited for high-severity violations in nearly every recent inspection cycle.
The April 2026 inspection, five months before this one, produced seven high-severity violations and three intermediate violations, a higher count than the September visit. The January 2025 inspection produced five high-severity violations. The August 2024 inspection produced six high-severity violations and one intermediate, a nearly identical profile to the September 2026 report.
The facility was emergency-closed once. In September 2025, inspectors documented rodent activity and ordered the restaurant shut. It reopened the following day after two follow-up inspections. The closure stands as the single most severe enforcement action in the facility's record.
What the history shows is a pattern of serious violations that has persisted across multiple inspection cycles, multiple years, and at least one emergency closure, without apparent sustained improvement. The September 2024 through September 2026 window alone includes four inspections with two or more high-severity violations each.
The Facility Remained Open
State inspectors documented six high-severity violations at Wandee Asian Fusion on September 2, 2026. The violations included improperly stored toxic chemicals, missing shellfish traceability records, unsanitized food contact surfaces, no consumer advisory for raw foods, no employee health policy, and inadequate handwashing infrastructure.
The restaurant was not emergency-closed.
It continued operating on Memorial Highway, serving customers who had no way of knowing what the September 2 inspection report contained.
