Oysters, roast pork and panzanella: what will Stephen Harris serve for the 20th anniversary of The Sportsman?

In November it will be my 20th anniversary of taking over at The Sportsman, and I have been flicking through our early menus, looking for ways to celebrate this milestone. I thought about doing an event where we cooked the menu we opened with in 1999. I even considered charging the same prices as that first day – but as you will see later that may not be such a good idea.

Menus were short: I was cooking on my own for the first six months. I didn’t want to compromise on quality, so everything was finished to order.

Our earliest menu had a few dishes that I would really enjoy cooking again, such as watercress soup with oysters. I was proud of the deep green colour and smooth flavour achieved by rapid and minimal cooking (which also, as an aside, was incredibly healthy). The oysters went well, I think, because they picked out a slight ferrous taste in the watercress.

My main course would have to be pot roast pork “with sage roasting juices”. I have to admit that I adapted the dish from a very early Heston Blumenthal article – but it was stunning. A rack of pork, that is a section of loin on the rib bones, was slowly cooked in a cast-iron casserole with sage, carrot and onion, and the lid firmly secured. When it was just cooked I would remove the skin to make crackling, and cut the loin into chops. The meat was tender and full of flavour and the juices had the most natural, pure taste of any “gravy” I had ever tasted.

Having tested this in my flat in Whitstable, I couldn’t wait to unleash it on the public, or one man and his dog, as it was to be at first.

For dessert I would have to choose the hot chocolate pudding, which stayed on the menu for the first few years. This was before the “chocolate coulant” became ubiquitous. It had been invented by Michel Bras and became so popular because of the gooey chocolate sauce that oozed from the middle.

It was everywhere in the mid to late 2000s, and became more widely known as chocolate fondant. But I didn’t like the oversweet versions I often tasted, because I had worked hard to keep the pure chocolate flavour. I simply made a chocolate mousse and poured it into small aluminium moulds which could be baked to order. I sneaked some chocolate buttons into the mousses’ centre and this meant the pudding would be gooey in the middle. I remember making 20 at a time and freezing them until somebody ordered one.

One surprise on an early menu was the appearance of panzanella. I imagine I was unwilling to throw away bread – and I do remember the Italian guy who supplied some of our vegetables told me he could get fantastic late tomatoes from Italy even as late as November. The combination of the juice of these great tomatoes with the best Tuscan olive oil I could find, all spiked with basil and soaked into the dried bread, was something that intrigued our customers, and it soon became a big hit.

I would love to put it on the menu for my anniversary dinner but then I saw the price: £2.95. You could eat at The Sportsman and see change from £20. I don’t know why that makes me feel so old.