The Local Pour - Flight Coffee Hangar Cafe
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Flight Coffee Hangar Wellington: A Café Built on Care, Craft and the Next Generation of Baristas
For this edition of The Local Pour, we visited Flight Coffee Hangar in Wellington and sat down with General Manager Oliver , whose path into hospitality has taken him from Taiwan and California to Melbourne, and eventually, New Zealand.
What started as a plan to spend a few years abroad before opening a café back home became something else entirely.
Along the way, Toby found himself surrounded by mentors, competitors and industry leaders who were generous with their time and knowledge. Those experiences now shape the way he leads at The Hangar, from developing new baristas to creating memorable guest experiences and building a culture where people feel supported to keep learning.
Over a brew at The Hangar, we spoke with Toby about mentorship, competitions, signature drinks, service culture and why care remains one of the most important ingredients in any café.
What makes Flight Coffee Hangar different?
Flight Coffee Hangar is a specialty café in Wellington with a long-standing connection to craft, sourcing and education.
Flight started with the idea of “better coffee”, built by people who cared deeply about producers, transparency and quality. That thinking is still there, but at The Hangar it has become more approachable.
As Toby puts it:
“We do the nerdy stuff so you don’t have to.”
That line says a lot about the way The Hangar operates.
The team cares deeply about flavour, sourcing, training and consistency, but guests do not need to speak the same technical language to feel welcome. Some people come in for the full specialty experience. Others are heading to work, catching up with friends, or looking for a brew made well.
The job is to meet all of them with the same level of care.
Why does mentorship matter in cafés?
For Toby, the best parts of hospitality are often found in the people who take time with others.
That happened when he came to Flight. People noticed he cared, so they made time. They worked through technique with him, pushed him, and helped him sharpen the parts of the craft he wanted to understand better.
Now, he tries to pass that on.
Last year, Toby hired someone with no barista experience after no one else had given him a shot. Toby’s view was simple. If he could be great front of house, the barista skills could come.
Within a year, he had become one of The Hangar’s main baristas.
For café owners, it is a useful reminder. Experience matters, but it’s not everything. Some of the best people are the ones who care enough to learn, show up well for customers and take pride in the small things.
You can teach technique.
It’s much harder to teach care.
How does The Hangar make specialty feel accessible?
Specialty can sometimes feel intimidating.
The Hangar tries to avoid that.
The team tastes, tests, adjusts and refines, but most of that work happens behind the scenes. The guest don’t need to know every variable. They just need to feel looked after.
They care a lot. They try hard. Nothing goes on the menu unless the team believes it’s strong. Onceit’s there, they keep working to make it better.
The standard is high, but the welcome stays relaxed.
That is where a lot of cafés can take something useful. You don’t need to flatten the craft to make people comfortable. You just need to remove the ego from how you share it.
What does care look like in a busy café?
When Toby talks about The Hangar, he keeps coming back to one word.
Care.
“For me, the main word is care.”
Care in the product. Care in the service. Care in the team. Care in how guests are treated, even during the busiest parts of the day.
When a café is serving hundreds of people, it is easy for each interaction to feel small. But for the person on the other side of the counter, that moment might matter more than the team realise.
Toby talks about customers who come in every day. People who write thank you notes around Christmas. People who see the café as one steady part of their routine.
That changes the way you think about service.
A guest might only be there for a few minutes, but the feeling can last longer than the drink.
What is trending at The Hangar?
Toby has noticed a growing appetite for signature drinks and flavoured lattes, especially when they feel familiar enough for Wellington but still offer something new.
At The Hangar, recent specials have included tiramisu latte, tiramisu cloud and Mont Blanc-style serves. They are layered, memorable and visual, but still connected to flavours people understand.
Cold drinks are part of that shift too.
Wellington is not exactly built like a summer city, but cold drinks still have momentum, especially with younger guests. Toby sees the appeal. Iced drinks can feel more approachable and offer more room for visual storytelling.
For café owners, the lesson is simple. A signature drink doesn’t need to be complicated.
It might connect to the café, the season, the guest, the barista or the story behind the ingredients. When it does, it becomes more than a menu item. It becomes something people remember.
How does The Hangar think about value?
One of the harder conversations in specialty café culture is price.
Toby is honest about it. People will often pay more for a mocktail, then question why a carefully made latte or brew costs what it does.
For him, the issue isn’t that people don’t care. It is that they don’t always see the work behind the cup.
The farmer. The importer. The roaster. The barista. The wage costs. The wastage. The dialling in. The training. The service.
All of that sits inside the final price.
It is not an easy education piece, because no one wants to feel lectured while ordering their daily cup. The way forward is to help guests see more of the care involved.
That is where storytelling matters.
How do competitions shape the team?
Competitions have played a big role in Toby’s own journey.
He has competed in cup tasting over the past few years and sees it as a way of saying thank you to the people who trained him. It is also about striving for excellence.
That mindset has carried into the wider team.
When competitions come up, the café changes. People practise after work. They spend more time together. They talk through ideas. They push each other.
The energy lifts.
For Toby, the team element matters just as much as the outcome. Competitions give people a shared goal, and shared goals are powerful in a café setting.
They create momentum, pride and a reason to keep learning.
What does Toby want the next generation of baristas to understand?
There is one thing Toby says he would tell his younger self.
“It’s not about you.”
When he first started, he admits he knew a little, but not as much as he thought. Over time, the more he learned, the more he understood how much there was still to learn.
Now, his focus is on the customer.
That shows up in the way The Hangar thinks about service and customisation. If someone wants a change, and the team can make it work, the answer is usually yes.
Not because standards do not matter.
Because hospitality does.
The role of the barista isn’t to prove how much they know. It’s to use that knowledge to make the experience better for the person in front of them.
What is next for Flight Coffee Hangar?
Toby is thinking a lot about education, experience and connection.
One idea he is exploring involves postcards that guests could fill out after trying certain brews. Those notes could then be sent back to producers, creating a more direct line between the person drinking the cup and the person who helped grow it.
The idea comes from something simple.
When the café receives a thoughtful review, it means a lot. It reminds the team why the work matters. Toby wonders what that kind of feedback could mean to producers, who do so much of the hard work but do not always hear from the people enjoying the final cup.
It’s a small idea with a big feeling behind it.
A café can be more than the last stop in the supply chain. It can be a place where guests, baristas, roasters and producers feel more connected to each other.
