At the core of Breakaway Cafe is a simple but powerful idea: a business should be about more than making money. It should be about creating a space where people feel valued, where creativity is nurtured, and where the community comes together. Owner Ben Cole has taken this idea and turned it into a reality, proving that when a business is rooted in compassion and care, it can become something extraordinary.
Originally known as Flight Coffee, a Bedford, New Hampshire roaster founded and headed up by Claudia Barrett—her original vision for the coffee shop was rooted in sourcing the top 1-5% of the world’s coffee beans, emphasizing the importance of transparency and direct relationships with coffee farmers. Barrett’s approach aligned with the specialty coffee movement, focusing on the journey of each bean from farm to cup. Barrett’s philosophy was clear—each coffee had a unique story to share, and Flight Coffee was (is) dedicated to connecting customers to that story.
When Kelly Bowers took over the café, he built on the already strong foundation with his own vision. Flight became a vibrant cultural hub, hosting local live music from local and showcasing rotating local artist exhibits. Bowers initiatives created a welcoming atmosphere where patrons felt like part of a larger, supportive community. Bowers also reinforced the café’s commitment to sustainability—not pocketing any of the café’s profits but instead investing right back into the employees, the café, and the Dover community.
“It is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done [to] give my time, money and resources to this cafe,” Bower said in a 2019 interview with The New Hampshire .“It would almost be silly to take a paycheck because we get paid in so many other ways by doing what we do.”
Within two years of Bower’s ownership, the Flight Café in Dover quadrupled its business.
At the time, Ben Cole had spent the last fifteen years working as a chef. He had grown up in the punk hardcore community and wanted to focus more on his own music, so he took six months off. He lived behind Flight and was coming to Flight every day. Eventually, Ben got to know Bowers, and Bowers asked if he wanted to come back to work. Here was an opportunity to cook and not “go back to the killing yourself at night drinking until 3am service industry,” said Ben. Plus, the opportunity at Flight allowed Ben to focus on his music.
Bowers hired Ben as kitchen manager, and Ben wrote the menu, developed the back of the house team, which eventually led to a general management position dealing with bookkeeping, profit and loss statements, dealing with food costs. “I started dealing with those bigger ideas and started getting interested in business ownership.”
“That’s when Kelly [Bowers] started leaning into me to take over that business ownership, giving me a path to buy the café in the future. I bought the café as Flight, and we kept the name for two years.”
Then, Flight began evolving into more than just a coffee shop that Ben owned. “We started building up a brand identity that I felt was different from the original identity of the café that I had started working at. We were inspired to change and develop in a new way. Changing the name was a way to give the employees and staff something they could feel ownership over, something that truly represented them and their work for Dover,” Ben explained.
Ben explained many of the social norms that come along with the service industry are norms and ways of doing business he wanted to change and break away from. Think Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen or Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential where bullying and harassment are romanticized, glorified as a product of kitchen subculture, and consequently normalized in the kitchen.
“Take really passionate and really talented, hardworking people, and the service industry is just one of those trades that chews you up and spits you out. And is continuously just trying to minimize the value of people,” explained Ben. “I think it’s important in any job, in any trade, as an owner, a leader, that you try to maximize the value of the people.”
“You know, we do take the work we do very seriously. And we bring in people that are also as serious as Dan, Patrick, Alexa, Mark and myself and all the people here that are just as serious and as passionate. The day you dread going to work, or the day you hate your job and hate your boss, and all this stuff, it’s because you lack ownership, you lack passion. It’s really important for all of us to be offered something to care about. Be real about looking at your books and checking out your percentages and making sure that you’re working towards a business model that lives up not only to yourself, but to your employees too.”
Ben’s business philosophy is not just an interest in turning a profit—he’s focused on lifting up not only his employees but the community around him.
When Emmett Soldati off Teatotaller fame moved into the empty Adele’s Coffee location across from City Hall, instead of being concerned about the competition, Ben offered supplies if the tea shop ever ran short. “Even though I was already someone who admired Teatotaller—I used to get that breakfast sandwich there all the time—I thought the proper thing to do would be to officially introduce myself,” Ben said.
“I just think, that’s what community should be.”
Breakaway even has a trade relationship with Rebecca Johnson and the Flower Room next door. “The Flower Room gets coffee, we get fresh cut flowers on the tables, which is like one of the most classic little beautiful things that makes people coming in happy. It’s an easy thought that you know, instead of the Flower Room spending hundreds of dollars on coffee and us not having flowers on the table, we might as well just help each other. Both of us become better”.
“One of the biggest things I’m really proud of, one of the bigger accomplishments of the café is the Mish Mash Market and Esther Wald. Esther ran awesome vintage and thrift markets in the past. And just really deeply understood community building,” said Ben. Except Esther didn’t have a space for her market. Ben said he and the Breakaway staff didn’t know what a market like this in Dover would look like, or how it would work out. “But I gave Esther the opportunity to do the market here. For nothing. And we built something together. Eventually they said, hey, I want to start paying you some kind of rental fee.”
“That’s the most beautiful way any kind of community can work. You help each other and then it becomes mutually beneficial to both people.”
“There’s a lot of times where we just have a hard time building community because of what’s in front of us and what’s allowed to us and what’s offered to us,” said Ben. Nowhere is that struggle more evident than in the loss of the live music scene at Breakaway Café.
For years, Breakaway provided a gathering point for the Seacoast’s punk and hardcore community, a space where the music was loud, the energy was electric, and a deep sense of belonging flourished. Ben grew up in that punk scene and understood the importance of having a safe, welcoming venue for artists and fans alike. That’s why, when he had the chance to host live shows at Breakaway, it felt like a natural extension of the café’s mission to nurture creativity and foster community.
However, complaints from neighbors, coupled with legal restrictions in his lease, forced his hand. It was a significant blow—not just to Breakaway, but to the community that had come to rely on those shows as a vital part of their cultural fabric. “We were creating a hardcore scene right here, a place where kids could come and be themselves, where the music brought people together in ways that nothing else could,” Ben explained.
In losing the music program, Breakaway lost one of its most tangible ways of bringing people together.
“You can operate under the aspect of like everyone’s coming to get me, and so I need to be better than everyone. Or you can just operate under, like, Dover’s growing, and it’s gonna get bigger,” Ben reflects. “We all need to stick together because it’s a rising water that’s gonna lift all the ships.” With that mindset, Ben didn’t let the end of the live music program stop him.
Instead, he took the spirit of those live shows and has begun pouring into something new: Breakaway Productions, a grassroots initiative to continue hosting DIY shows in alternative venues around the Seacoast. Fitness studios, basements, parking lots—Ben’s commitment to community through music has taken on a nomadic quality, moving wherever it’s allowed to exist.
“When they tell you that you can’t, then that’s when it’s most important to keep going,” Ben said.
*Edits/corrections made 9:57am 9/6/24 for clarity and a name correction.
