Before Jeannine Gorski cleaned restaurants, she worked in them. “I worked in kitchens,” she says. “I was a waitress and absolutely loved it.”
Her whole working career was in the restaurant business, and her husband has put in years of his own. “My husband and I have a combined 35 years in the industry, and we love it so much,” she says. She wanted to stay in that world and change her place in it. So she started Bay State Restaurant Cleaning, a commercial cleaning company registered in Marshfield, Massachusetts, that specializes in nightly restaurant cleaning. She bootstrapped it herself and is the sole owner.
“This was just a great way for me to pivot and work for myself,” she says.
That background is the company’s whole case, and she makes it plainly. Gorski does not take on residential work. “I’m not out here spread out doing residential cleaning. We’re not out here trying to spread ourselves too thin. We stay within our expertise, which is the restaurant world,” she says. She credits her years in restaurants with knowing what a kitchen has to look like to pass. “We really know what it takes to get up to standards and to be well within the health codes as well.”
According to the company’s website, a restaurant job splits into front of house and back of house, with restrooms handled on their own. Front of house means the entrance, the dining room, lounges and the bar, down to the bar mats. Crews vacuum carpets, run floor machines or sweep and mop, dust high and low, and clean windows, glass and blinds.
Back of house is the kitchen: the line, the hood and filters, the drains, the floor mats, the equipment and the surfaces, plus break areas, hallways and back offices. The site says restrooms get cleaned from the ceiling down, walls, door handles, faucets and mirrors along with the toilets and floors.
The company schedules around a restaurant’s operating hours, and it can add street-side seasonal dining areas, private patios and event rooms. Late-night lounges and nightclubs are part of the work too. The website notes that places with late hours are hard for a regular staff to keep clean.
Restaurants are the core, but Gorski says the company also cleans bars, lounges and nightclubs, and can take on banks and country clubs. “We can do more, but we specialize in restaurant cleaning. That’s where we shine.”
Gorski runs the work through crews. The company onboards new people and checks that everyone lives up to the standard she sets, and she says the people she brings on already work that way. “It’s not only my name that’s on it. Their name’s on it, too, and they take pride in their work,” she says.
Her own name carries the same weight with her. “I always feel like if my name’s attached to something, there’s no way I’m going to let it be anything but the best,” she says.
Customers have noticed. One restaurant owner wrote in a Google review that the staff is always on time and leaves the place immaculate. Another wrote that Gorski was accommodating and worked to make sure the restaurant was happy with what her crews did.
The company services hospitality groups in Boston, where Gorski says the demand is strongest, and works down on the Cape as well. She has gone out to Western Massachusetts, the company has been to New Hampshire and has work in Rhode Island, and she says it can take on accounts in Vermont depending on the area. “We are really a New England based service,” she says.
She thinks a company her size has something the national chains do not. “We’re not somebody that’s so big that our clients get lost within the mix of people,” she says. Smaller and newer businesses, in her view, “have so much more to prove.”
When she talks about cleaning, she sounds a lot like she does when she talks about her years waiting tables and working the line. “I’ve never hated a day of work in my life when I worked in the industry,” she says. “I want to make your food the best, I want to put my love into it.”