You’re not supposed to write about your very favorite place. Somehow you’ll upset the cosmos. Or you’ll blow the open secret. But so strong are my feelings for the Bellwether Bar that it requires pushing through any hesitance.

Bellwether lives inside the historic Thomas Graham Building (built in 1910) on the gentle sloping shoulder of SE Stark Street as it cuts across Mt. Tabor. Here, owners Ansel Vickery (formerly of the NE Fremont neighborhood bar Free House) and Rob Merollis have built a kind of modern Portland bar and grill: cocktails and beers, steaks and burgers. On paper, it’s the stuff of a thousand suburban joints and striving dives. (My wife calls it “Indie TGI Friday’s.”) But there is some magic in this old, wood-floored space. The interior stays dark and moody in full sun. An ancient bartop occupies the center of the room and windows look out onto the street past Greek revival columns. On the back patio—leafy, fenced-in, picnic benches with plastic floral tablecloths—dappled Tabor sunlight streams in through hedges and trees.

The atmosphere is earned: a product of having contained over a century of human interaction.

Chef Jimmy Askren knows how to subvert the staid bar-and-grill menu. I order the grilled shrimp cocktail riff every time. Large prawns wearing a nice char come with Old Bay–spiked cocktail sauce and a burnt half lemon, which lends even more smoky depth to the tangy sauce. The house green salad is at least 50 percent herbs (dill, mint, chives) and dressed with a cleansing shock of vinaigrette, exactly as a restaurant green salad should be. The burger isn’t a smashburger, but it’s not a great big thick bar burger, either; it’s some wonderful other third thing, with textured layers of crunch and flavor given pride of place. A thin patty of Revel Meat Co. beef is stacked high atop a mess of shredded lettuce between a crunchy, toasted pub bun. Bavette steaks, too, are chargrilled par excellence and served with frites and aioli.

These are the core components—shrimp, salad, a burger, a steak—and occasionally I branch out with, say, a sort of Moroccan flared spicy cauliflower dish, or asparagus topped with cheffy sauce gribiche, or a whipped ricotta toast sporting snap peas and pickled green strawberries, again with multiple layers of crunch, the tart pinch of the strawberries promising summer’s coming heat.

The century-old room and deceptively sophisticated menu are supported by the bar’s drink program, which offers multitudes. The ever-changing progression of cocktails are simply numbered in lieu of names: no. 62 has mezcal and falernum, no. 59 blended scotch and fernet. But these may well have changed by the time you read this. There’s a concise list of local beers on tap, some heavy hitter bourbons (Weller, George Dickel), and well drinks served tall and cold, if all you’re really after is a vodka soda. Verily you can come here and just drink—it is, after all, a bar—and doing so feels totally fine.

It’s in that spirit that Bellwether can be whatever you need it to be, and this is meant as a point of respect. I’ve come here at the start of dates, the end of dates, and as the main event of dates. I come to destress on very bad days, and to celebrate on very good ones. Sometimes I come to work, sitting at one of two street-facing tables on the porch, typing away over a vodka soda while Bellwether patrons flow by. I have taken my 74-year-old mother here, and I have taken my daughter, who is 7; and both at the same time.

I keep coming back because Bellwether has bottled something I love deeply about Portland, this pocket of Southeast Portland in particular, with the city splayed out before you and the wind in the trees all around. It’s the way the light bounces off Mt. Tabor, that feeling of being in both an urban place and a forest at the very same time. It feels like a bar that has always been here, and will be here whether I’m there or not, whether I write about it or not.