10x Faster, Fully Redundant: Rebuilding SushiSamba's Network Between Services

The Challenge

SushiSamba’s London flagship sits high in Heron Tower - a three-floor destination restaurant serving 250 staff and a constant flow of diners from breakfast to late night. The network underneath all of that was doing a lot: CCTV, point-of-sale and payments, customer WiFi, back-of-house operations. And it was showing its age.

The core problem wasn’t the equipment itself, it was how it had come to be. Over time, multiple suppliers had added to the network in pieces. There was no central management, no consolidated reporting, and no single place to look when something went wrong. Specifically:

• Instability between network services - Critical systems competed with each other in ways that were nobody’s fault and everybody’s problem
• Zero visibility - No central reporting of device health, no alerting on service availability, no way to pinpoint issues quickly
• Firmware falling behind - On a 24/7 site, there was never a clean window to upgrade devices, leaving infrastructure vulnerable to known issues
• Critical services running on fragile plumbing - Payments, CCTV and customer WiFi were all depending on a network that nobody fully understood

For a restaurant where payment reliability during service is non-negotiable, this was no longer acceptable as a status quo.

Our Approach

We treated this as an engineering problem with a very specific primary constraint: payment functionality must not fail. Everything else - speed, redundancy, manageability - was subordinate to that single requirement.

Design, Prototype, Prove

We planned and prototyped a full network replacement built end-to-end on Cisco Meraki, with resilience and redundancy as the architectural backbone. Every design decision was measured against the payment reliability constraint, which led us to a topology with redundant wireless paths so that even a single radio failure couldn’t interrupt card transactions on the floor.

The Overnight Cutover

A site like SushiSamba doesn’t close often. When it does, the window is measured in hours, not nights. We planned the cutover meticulously with SushiSamba’s project team so that the upgrade started the moment the last cover left and completed in time for the next day’s trading.

During that single overnight window, we replaced:

• All wireless access points across every floor
• The entire switching fabric with redundant uplinks
• The firewall stack with a failover configuration
• The internet connectivity with an alternate route for resilience

Faster, Doubled, Managed

When service resumed the next day, SushiSamba was running on a network with 10x the core network speed of the old environment and fully doubled redundancy - alternate network routes and redundant internet connectivity meaning that a single point of failure no longer takes the site down.

And for the first time, everything was centrally managed and centrally observed through the Meraki dashboard.

The Results

SushiSamba’s new network has delivered on every key requirement of the project - and it did it inside the agreed budget. Reliability is up, visibility is up, and the team can now pinpoint any issue faster and with far more accuracy than was ever possible before. Payments, which was the single most important measure for this project, simply work.

Perhaps most importantly, the site is no longer carrying a stealth risk. The infrastructure underneath one of London’s busiest destination restaurants is modern, supportable, redundant and transparent. That’s the kind of outcome a business can actually plan against.

Looking Forward

We continue to manage SushiSamba’s network as an ongoing service, monitoring health, applying firmware updates during the right windows, and advising on future enhancements. The hardest part of this project was planning the one night when we replaced everything - the easy part is keeping it running beautifully every day afterwards.