"The burger is a huge seller because it's local and it's so fresh," says Mark Goodenow. "People try it and they're telling their friends miles away to come and try it."
Mark is talking about a burger at The Goodmark, the restaurant he and his wife Gina opened on Watch Hill Road this past fall. What he's not saying, because he doesn't need to, is where that beef actually comes from. It's not arriving on a broadline foodservice truck from somewhere outside the county. It's coming from five minutes down the road, from a farm that was selling meat to this town before Mark was born.
That's the part of the story that generic write-ups about "Cortlandt Manor's new restaurant" tend to skip. The opening is the easy headline. The supply line is the interesting one.
A Restaurant Three Decades in the Making
The Goodmark opened quietly on November 7, followed by a friends-and-family event and a ribbon cutting with the Hudson Valley Chamber of Commerce in early December. Mark and Gina Goodenow aren't newcomers scouting a hot suburb. They moved to Cortlandt Manor in June 2009, back when Gina was pregnant with their daughter Mia, who was a junior at Hendrick Hudson High School when the restaurant opened and works the garde manger station there, learning salads and appetizers under executive chef Ally Epstein.
Mark's own path to Watch Hill Road wasn't direct. He started in a Big Boy dish room in the Detroit area at 13, spent years in serious kitchens, then pivoted through a decade in consulting and another in aerospace before circumstances pointed him back toward food. Along the way he tried and failed to buy a restaurant five separate times. The Goodmark is what finally worked.
None of that history would matter much if the restaurant just reheated familiar suburban American fare and called it a night. What makes it worth a resident's attention is what the Goodenows chose to do with their kitchen once it was theirs.
Five Minutes Down Watch Hill Road
Most people in Cortlandt Manor already know Hemlock Hill Farm, even if they've never called it by that name. It's the place on Croton Avenue where families go for a Thanksgiving turkey, where the DeMaria family has been raising cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and geese since 1939. It's a working farm with a market attached, not a boutique concept built for Instagram.
The Goodmark buys its meat there. According to a February 2026 profile in Westchester Magazine, the restaurant keeps almost no freezer space at all, aside from french fries and ice cream. Everything else arrives fresh, delivered three days a week, and the relationship with Hemlock Hill Farm is the backbone of that arrangement. For dessert, the kitchen turns to Baked by Susan in neighboring Croton-on-Hudson.
That's a short list, but it's worth sitting with:
- Meat: Hemlock Hill Farm, a five-minute drive on Croton Avenue
- Dessert: Baked by Susan, over in Croton-on-Hudson
- Everything else: local meat purveyors, delivered fresh three times a week, no walk-in freezer to fall back on
A restaurant that skips the freezer is making a bet on its neighbors showing up reliably. In this case, the neighbor showing up is a farm that's been doing this since before the interstate highway system existed.
Why the Old Guard Didn't Move Over
The Goodmark isn't trying to replace anything, and that matters for how you should think about the town's food scene right now. Cortlandt Colonial Restaurant and Ballroom, on Old Albany Post Road, has been a family-run fixture since 1978. It's built around banquet halls that seat up to 200, weddings, sweet sixteens, and a Sunday champagne brunch buffet, a completely different lane from a small neighborhood dinner spot. Monteverde at Oldstone, sitting on 27 wooded acres off Bear Mountain Bridge Road, occupies its own space too, closer to an event destination than a weeknight stop.
None of these places are competing for the same table. Cortlandt Manor's dining scene isn't being consolidated or overwritten by one new opening. It's a town where a 1978 banquet hall, a 27-acre event venue, and a small new restaurant with no freezer space can all be true at the same time, because they're answering different questions about the same evening.
What Actually Changed Here
The real shift isn't that Cortlandt Manor got a new restaurant. Suburbs get new restaurants constantly, and most of them source through the same regional distributors as everywhere else, with a "local" sticker on the menu that means very little in practice. What changed is that a new owner, choosing where to build his supply chain from scratch, looked at what already existed in town and decided to run through it rather than around it.
That's a different kind of local than the marketing version. You can test it yourself. If the burger is the draw, you can drive to Hemlock Hill Farm's own market on Croton Avenue and buy the same cut the restaurant is cooking. If dessert is what brings you back, Baked by Susan sells directly out of Croton-on-Hudson. The restaurant isn't the only door into this particular food chain. It's just the newest one.
For a town that doesn't get written about much beyond its zip code and its proximity to Peekskill, that's a genuinely different way to think about what's new here. The newest thing in Cortlandt Manor is, structurally, one of the oldest things in Cortlandt Manor wearing a different name on the sign.
If you're already living here, that's a good excuse to try the burger and see what the fuss is about. If you're thinking about Cortlandt Manor as a place to put down roots of your own, this is the kind of detail that tells you more about a town than a listing sheet ever will. Dominick Passafiume has spent years working this stretch of Westchester and Putnam and is always glad to talk through what a neighborhood is actually like to live in, not just what it looks like from the outside.
