The East Mississippi Community College Lion Hills Center will have a special guest for a few days.
Austin, Texas-based chef Carlos Montemayor will be at the center until Easter Sunday, helping to prepare for the center’s Easter menu and preparing for one of his biggest annual events. Montemayor, a former employee of Lion Hills, the Columbus Country Club, and the Old Waverly Place, will next travel to The Masters at Augusta National from April 5-8 in Augusta, Georgia to cook for several dignitaries associated with Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems. Montemayor was a classmate of Lion Hills Executive Chef Matthew Molina at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin.
“The people that I take care of are at the top of their field,” Montemayor said of cooking at the tournament. “It’s Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems of North America, so it’s always a lot of work, a lot of shop, but at the same time, I try to provide them with nice meat and potatoes, but upper-scale, higher-quality food.”
He said among the dishes he planned to serve to the Mitsubishi Hitachi group would be a bone-in rib-eye steak topped with a bone marrow and black truffle compound butter and Maryland crabmeat.
He said he would cook for up to 50 people at The Masters, depending on the meal. This will be his fifth year cooking at the tournament.
Montemayor said he comes back to Lion Hills approximately once a year to visit Molina and bounce ideas off of him.
“The cool thing is we’ve been cooking (together) off and on for 15 years,” Molina said. “We went to culinary school together at Cordon Bleu in Austin, Texas, and we were able to work together at Old Waverly here in West Point, and then he was chef here at Columbus Country Club.”
Molina said culinary students at Lion Hills would also have some opportunity to work under Montemayor in preparation for the Easter brunch. He said students could pick up several skills from Montemayor, including efficiency and knife skills. He also said students would benefit from seeing Monteymaor’s style of cooking in relation to his own.
“He’s really having to challenge himself,” Molina said.“All year long, he’s prepping for these types of events. He’s challenging himself with all new types of recipes, not repeating the same recipes year to year, so for him to learn for a year, and for me to learn for a year, and when he’s here, we get to collaborate, brainstorm, think-tank about new ideas, new recipes, and really just share last year’s experience on how we can be better chefs in the future.”
The Lion Hills Center has been an EMCC campus since 2012, when the institution purchased the grounds of the Columbus Country Club. The facility houses EMCC’s Hospitality industry programs including culinary arts, hotel and restaurant management, turf management and landscape management. It also houses a golf course open to the public and two restaurants. Event rooms are also available for rental.
“We have a lot of hotels here in town who are looking for people to work in the hospitality area,” said Lion Hills Director Cheryl Hubbard. “They’ll even talk to (EMCC culinary instructor) Chef Shannon (Lindell) to get those students to intern and work for them during their time when they’re in school here.”