Broadway in Valhalla is short enough that you can walk the whole commercial stretch in about four minutes without hurrying. On one end sits a nineteen-seat café that didn't exist a year ago. A few doors down, past the old Metro-North tracks, sits a dining room built from a caboose that was hauling freight through Ohio when Broadway was still dirt. Most commercial strips this size have one story. This one has two, and they're a century apart.
The Newest Table on Broadway
The Farm Café opened at 26 Broadway in late December 2025, and it's small on purpose. Westchester Magazine counted the seats at nineteen when it featured the spot in its January 2026 roundup of new places to try, describing it as "a new farm-to-table restaurant serving breakfast, lunch, and coffee." The menu leans toward the health-conscious end of things, with vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options built in rather than added as an afterthought, and a tiramisu latte that the magazine singled out as the thing to order.
For a hamlet whose commercial district has historically run more toward pizza and comfort food than oat-milk lattes, a farm-to-table breakfast counter is a genuinely new kind of business to have on Broadway. It's the sort of place that didn't need to open here. Valhalla isn't a downtown in the way White Plains or Scarsdale are downtowns. It's a couple of blocks that mostly exist to serve the commuters coming off the train and the county workers heading to the office buildings nearby. A nineteen-seat café betting on tiramisu lattes and gluten-free bagels is a bet that this stretch of Broadway has more foot traffic worth catering to than it used to.
A Very Different History Two Doors Down
Walk past the café toward the old train station and you land at Valhalla Crossing, a restaurant that has been serving lunch and dinner out of the historic Valhalla train station since 1973. The building sits on the Taconic Parkway close to Kensico Dam, and it's open six days a week, closed only on Mondays, with live entertainment on Saturday nights.
What makes it worth a special trip isn't the burger menu, though the regulars will tell you the burgers are the reason they keep coming back. It's that you can eat dinner inside an actual 1910 B&O caboose or an 1896 Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway car, because those are the two structures the restaurant uses as dining rooms. The original station building, with its wide-planked floors still intact, is now the bar. The bar itself is even older than the building it sits in. It was built in 1903 for Bronxville's Hotel Gramatan and later moved here.
The man behind all of it was William Scazzero, who bought both rail cars in 1973 and spent years restoring them before opening what was then called Valhalla Station. He and his family ran the restaurant for about 25 years before it eventually became Valhalla Crossing under new ownership, though the cars, the station, and the Gramatan bar all stayed put.
The Rail Cars Have Their Own Paper Trail
The 1896 car has a history that goes well past its dining-car second life. It was built by the Wagner Palace Car Company, whose president at the time was Dr. William Seward Webb, son-in-law of William H. Vanderbilt. The car was first assigned to Daniel W. Caldwell and later W. H. Newman, both presidents of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, a predecessor of the New York Central west of Buffalo. Later still, it served as the official car of the New York Central's own president.
In 1928 the car was renumbered NYC 17. In 1940 it was pulled from passenger service and converted into a diner for wreck-train crews, renumbered again to X-928, and eventually based out of Jackson, Michigan. It was retired and sold in 1970 to a group of former New York Central employees who moved it to Harmon, New York. Scazzero bought it in January 1973 and brought it to Valhalla for restoration. The caboose has a shorter but similar arc: built in 1910 by the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, retired to a B&O freight yard in Chillicothe, Ohio, and purchased the same year as the railway car to complete the pair.
None of that history is on a plaque out front. It's the kind of thing you only know if you've asked, or if you've gone looking the way we did. It's also the reason a burger at Valhalla Crossing carries more weight than a burger anywhere else in the hamlet. You're not just eating in an old building. You're eating in a car that once belonged to a railroad president and later hauled wreckage crews around the Midwest.
Same Two Blocks, and a Trail That Starts From Them
What ties the café and the dining cars together isn't just proximity. It's that both sit within easy walking distance of the trail network that runs through Valhalla and around Kensico Reservoir, and fall is when that network is at its best. The reservoirs and trailways here are known for foliage that's better than the drive-by version most people see from the Taconic.
There's a car-free path on the east side of the Valhalla dam that connects directly into Kensico Dam Plaza, avoiding the steep climb and heavier traffic on North Kensico Avenue. From there, the options scale depending on how much of the afternoon you want to give up.
| If you have | Try this | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| An hour | The car-free path along the east side of the dam into Kensico Dam Plaza | Short out-and-back |
| A half-day bike ride | The Kensico Reservoir loop | About 21.2 miles, roughly two hours by bike |
| A long walk or run | The Bronx River Pathway toward Hartsdale | About 10.3 miles, with roughly 377 feet of elevation gain |
The North County Trailway, which the reservoir loop connects into, is part of the paved rail-trail system that runs 22.1 miles from Eastview to Baldwin Place and is now folded into the statewide Empire State Trail. It's flat, mostly shaded, and built on an old railroad bed, which means the same corridor that once carried the trains now carries the joggers and cyclists instead. There's a small symmetry in that, given what's parked two blocks away on Broadway.
What a Two-Block Strip Adds Up To
Most people driving through Valhalla see the dam, maybe the county office buildings, and not much else. The two blocks of Broadway don't announce themselves. But a hamlet this size rarely has both a business that opened nine months ago and a dining room with a documented, decade-by-decade paper trail back to the 1890s, all within sight of each other and within a five-minute walk of a trail loop good enough to draw cyclists from across the county.
That range, old and new sitting on the same short block, isn't something you'd guess from a drive-by. It's the kind of detail you only pick up by spending time here, which is exactly the point of paying attention to a neighborhood this small.
If you're curious what else is tucked into corners of Westchester like this one, Gino Bello Homes keeps digging up the details that don't show up on a map.
