Seafood since 1980. One family. One guest list.
Sankey's has run pubs and seafood restaurants in Tunbridge Wells since 1980 on instinct, good produce and a stack of tools that never quite talked to each other. Then Matthew Sankey put bookings, payments, reviews and marketing into one system. Here is what changed on the floor, and what he found in the numbers.
A family firm that sells oysters by the dozen.
Sankey's is a family group of pubs, seafood and a fishmonger. The Old Fishmarket, a champagne and oyster bar on the Pantiles, is the one locals point visitors to. The George & Dragon in Speldhurst is the village pub, with live-fire Sundays and a menu for dogs. The original, the Seafood Kitchen & Bar in a Victorian manor house on Mt Ephraim, closed in May 2026 for a full redevelopment of the site. Between them they take crab and lobster from Cadgwith Cove, oysters from Carlingford, Colchester, Lindisfarne and Cornwall, and one of the deepest beer lists in Kent.
It is a family business, and Matthew Sankey runs it the way family businesses get run: close to the detail, allergic to waste, and suspicious of anything that adds a monthly fee without taking a job off somebody's plate. “We are a family run business that employs real people,” the website says. “Our team cares about what they do and we really think that matters.”
That also means every system the venues use has to earn its place with the people on the floor, on a Friday night, with a queue at the pass.
There had to be a better way.
Picture the old routine. A guest phones during Friday service. Someone leaves the pass, finds the booking screen, types a name and an email address with one ear on the kitchen, hangs up, and goes back to plating. Later that night, a manager opens the till reports in one tab, the booking system in another, the review tool in a third, and copies numbers between them. At the weekend, a mailing list gets exported and re-imported somewhere else. Every step is done properly, by people who care, and the whole thing works right up until the moment it doesn't.
That was Sankey's before Stampede, and it is how most independent groups run. Bookings in one system, the till in another, a review tool, a mailing list, guest Wi-Fi from the broadband provider. Each one worked. None of them knew about the others, and every link between them was a bolt-on somebody had to watch. The cost showed up in small, repeated failures. The email address taken down wrong mid-service, so no confirmation went out. The guest who did not confirm, did not turn up, and could not be charged because no card was ever taken. The phone ringing when the restaurant was shut, or too busy to answer, and the booking going somewhere else. None of it was dramatic. All of it added up.
Having everything under one roof is simply superior, full stop. There are no integrations to set up and then fall over.
Matthew's own read on the old setup is blunter than any consultant's. People are good at hospitality and bad at repetition. Software is the opposite. The job is to hand the repetition to the software and give the people back to the guests.
“Human beings do a lot of our work, and human beings are the things that make mistakes. Digital staff are consistent, as long as they have been built properly. Taking some of that workload away so it is done the same way every time is really powerful for a restaurant.”
Built with the people who use it.
Sankey's went live on Stampede in March 2026. Bookings, guest Wi-Fi, reviews and email marketing went in together, with payments running through the group's existing Square tills. Stampede's customer team ran the onboarding, followed by second-round training sessions for venue staff once the product was in and the first questions had surfaced.
“Stampede's onboarding was second to none. Jaw-droppingly good. We were also able to have secondary training sessions for our team after the product was installed to iron out any issues the team were facing, which was a great help. The support email is fast and responsive and always comes back with simple instructions on how to achieve a solution.”
The part Matthew keeps coming back to is what happened after go-live. The team at Stampede talk to operators directly, and the product changes on the back of those conversations. Matthew is not shy about telling them what does not work. Several things he has flagged are now in the platform for every Stampede venue.
The most impressive thing has been the team at Stampede's ability to listen to how we use the software in the real world and apply changes, so that what the software set out to do actually gets done.
“I have never met a team that willing to sit and talk to the end users. We sometimes speak two different languages, the IT language and the consumer language. They listen, they understand, then they try something and ask, is that what you were after? It is a real pleasure dealing with them.”
The till and the booking finally talk.
Ask Matthew what the team noticed first and he does not mention a dashboard. He mentions the till. Sankey's takes payment on Square, and Stampede's integration with Square runs both ways: a booking made online carries through to the table, and what the table spends comes back onto the guest's record. Deposits, cancellation charges and pre-orders sit against the booking rather than in a spreadsheet next to it.
The biggest change we have seen on the front line is the integration with Square. Having the two systems talk to each other is a joy.
Every interaction lands on one guest record: the booking, the bill from Square, the review they left, the Wi-Fi sign-in, the email they opened. It belongs to Sankey's, it can be exported at any time, and there is no per-cover fee for using it.
Example profile. Figures illustrative.The numbers started talking back.
Here is the moment the story turns. On a call with his Stampede account manager, Matthew opened the reporting section for the first time. It pulls together bookings, Square sales, reviews and Wi-Fi for each venue, and it loads in a second. The first thing he saw was how the George & Dragon fills: roughly a third of covers arrive without booking ahead. The second was a list of what people buy together, with a particular pairing of a Harvey's and a Moretti appearing hundreds of times in ninety days.
I've never been in here. This is amazing. That is absolutely my weekend sorted.
How the room fills
Bought together
The point is not the dashboard. It is that the data behind it is Sankey's own: every booking, every bill, every review, tied to a guest the business can actually contact. A third of covers walking in is a marketing brief. A pairing that sells hundreds of times is a campaign.
What the numbers say so far.
The same guest list, put to work.
Matthew can see what the guest list is sitting on. Everything else the venues run reads from the same record.
Answering the phone
Sankey's phone system reports how many calls go unanswered, and the number is large: busy services and closed hours. Stampede's phone agent takes the booking, confirms by email and passes anything else back to the restaurant. Matthew's verdict on the price was "a bargain".
Smart seating
When a guest wants a time the floor plan cannot quite fit, the system shuffles existing bookings to make the table, without anyone touching the plan.
Ordering from the table
QR ordering for drinks and snacks in the beer garden, paid through Square, landing on the same guest profile. In Matthew's words, "a game changer" for a busy afternoon.
Loyalty that is not a gift voucher
Points redeemed against merchandise, early access to bookings for events like New Year's Eve, and one-off perks. Matthew's brief was simple: guests spend points on things, and the till recognises them.
I'm extremely excited about the raft of new capabilities, the phone system, smart table seating and table ordering, all within our customer CRM. It will allow us to discover who our customers really are.
Really pleased. Really enjoying working with Stampede.Matthew Sankey, owner, Sankey's Hospitality