On Moxham Avenue in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai, Hataitai Hot Bread Shop is a neighbourhood bakery with a 4.3 rating on Google and a Facebook page as its online home.
A good hot bread shop lives and dies by its oven. Bread baked on the premises is at its best warm from the rack, so regulars learn the bake times and turn up soon after a fresh tray comes out — usually earliest in the day, when the shelves are fullest. In most New Zealand bakeries the pie warmer matters as much as the loaves: a proper pie should have crisp, flaky pastry and a filling that is genuinely hot through, while a filled roll or cream bun rounds out the classic line-up. Supermarket bread keeps longer, but nothing beats a loaf eaten the day it was baked.
For Hataitai locals, that kind of loaf is a short walk away on Moxham Avenue.