Nineteen kitchens opened since July, five at one West King address

A kitchen in Florida cannot serve anybody until an inspector has stood in it. That visit has a name, Food-Licensing Inspection, and it lands in the state’s file with a date and a list of whatever went wrong. It is the closest thing this county has to a birth announcement for a restaurant.

Since July 1 there have been nineteen.

Not one of them is on any list of where to eat in St. Augustine, because they are all too new to be on one. Half are somebody’s first restaurant.

Five doors at one address

Five of the nineteen licensed at 233 W King St, Suite A: Top Hibachi Catering and Puerto Rican Twist on July 1, Legacy Donuts on July 14, Afro-Sazon on July 30, Blu Plate on Aug. 27.

Five kitchens, one suite, ten weeks. That is a commissary or a shared kitchen, and it means West King Street is currently the most productive block of new food businesses in the county by a distance. Nothing else on the list has more than one.

Puerto Rican Twist, Afro-Sazon, Blu Plate and Top Hibachi all cleared their licensing visit with nothing written up. Legacy Donuts had one basic item.

Everybody who opened

Permanent kitchens and mobile vehicles both, newest first. The three numbers are high priority, intermediate and basic violations, in that order, as the state counts them.

Twelve of the nineteen had nothing written up at all. That is a better rate than the county’s routine inspections manage, which makes sense: nobody opens on the day the inspector is coming without having cleaned.

Two had a real list. Lickle Mobay Jamaican on US 1 South drew four high priority items and a warning, which is the only warning in the set. Al’s Yum Yum on San Jose Boulevard had seven items, none of them high priority, and the state closed the visit with no further action anyway. Both are open. A licensing inspection is a starting line and not a verdict, and the follow-up is the thing worth watching.

What this does not tell you

Whether any of it is good.

A licence says a kitchen exists, that somebody put money into it, and that a state inspector walked through on a particular day. It does not say what the food is like. Nobody has been to most of these rooms yet, including the people who write online about everywhere, and 2 Creeks Dockside on Lewis Boulevard is ten days old and comes up on a map as a building.

That is the interesting part. For about a month a new restaurant exists in the public record and nowhere else, and then the first reviews arrive and it becomes a place with a reputation whether it earned one or not.

This desk will get to them. Not yet.

What I’d order

Nothing, yet. Go first and tell somebody.