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Main Street restaurant Cotija Latin Flavors will hold its last dinner service on Saturday before restaurant owner Arturo Montoya  [shown above] will shut the doors and look for a new Asbury Park location.

Turns out Montoya, 33, an Asbury Park transplant by way of Columbia, Belmar, Jersey City, Miami and Neptune couldn’t come to agreeable terms with his business partner when the two split and they decided to sell the space. By late November, a new Mexican restaurant will take over, he said.

Cotija has held its location at 420 Main Street for just over four months.

“When I saw the place for the first time, it was such a small place and Main Streeet is such a great location I had a vision right away about what I wanted to do with the place,” he said.

Montoya learned the restaurant business by experience. He started as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Belmar 11 years ago, where he worked his way up to being a busboy and then waiter. While working at a restaurant in Jersey City a few years later, the owner saw great potential in him and he was offered his first management position, he said.

According to Montoya, his lack of professional training is one of his strengths.

“I think that’s a plus, because we’re not a cookie-cutter restaurant. There’s no limits for us,” he said. “There’s no rules— and our kitchen is open to anything.”

Cotija — a name for a Mexican municipality and a type of Mexican cheese — might convey a Mexican bent, but that is why he included the Latin Flavors part. It lets him produce an “anything goes” concept in terms of what the menu offers, since the menu is always changing, he said. The restaurant mixes flavors from different Latin American cuisines.

‘It’s a mixture of condiments, ingredients and ways of cooking from different places in Latin America,” he said. “We twist it around, we combine it, we play with it.”

On the current menu, the churrasco [a traditional Spanish skirt steak] is grilled Argentinian style, topped with Mexican style guacamole and served with Puerto Rican-style fried plantains, called mofongo.

He also utilized his employees to generate menu ideas.

“”We always forget about the cooks, the people that clean the restaurant—but those are people that are helping with the menu,” he said. “I asked them if they remembered dishes from Mexico when they are kids, and they do so I ask them to make them.”

Once, he proposed a Puerto Rican theme to one of his servers, who then brought him to her mother’s house so he could learn the dishes she made.

“She taught us Puerto Rican cooking 101, and that was one of our most successful themes ever,” he said.

Fortunately, Montoya was able to keep the Cojita restaurant name when he and his business partner split. For the next month or so he’ll be taking a break and then start the search for a new space to call Cotija Latin Flavors in Asbury Park, so he can reproduce the same concept in the new space.

“It was not pretentious and upscale—I just offered a concept,” he said. “The doors were open for everybody to try.”

Cotija Latin Flavors is located at 420 Main Street. Doors open for tonight’s final dinner service at 5 p.m. The restaurant is BYO.

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