At Happy Gillis Café & Hangout, a neighborhood gathering place returns to form

It was a cold, wet day, and the soup was as warm and comforting as the hot grilled Cuban sandwich, heaped with ham, roasted pork, pickles, Swiss cheese and mustard. I sat by myself, and there was only one other occupied table in the dining room. Two smartly dressed women seemed to have stumbled onto Happy Gillis by accident.

Shulte and his two-man staff have been slowly discovering what's popular with his customers — and what isn't. For example, the New Orleans-style muffaletta isn't ordered very often, Schulte says. I like a well-stacked muffaletta, but it never occurred to me to request one on any of my three lunches in the joint, probably because the other choices — neatly printed on a big chalkboard on the back wall — sounded a lot more interesting. The extraordinary curried chicken salad that I tasted several days later, crunchy with chopped cashews, was one of the best chicken salad sandwiches I've ever eaten.

The biggest surprise has been the positive response to his version of the classic Vietnamese banh mi sandwich. And I understand why: Schulte's take on banh mi ga (inspired by the French "salad sandwich" of lettuces and vegetables on a crusty baguette) is as tasty as the authentic ones sold just over the Heart of America Bridge at Vinh Hoa in North Kansas City. At Happy Gillis, a hunk of Farm to Market baguette is sliced open, piled with grilled chicken, fresh cilantro-and-scallion salad, jalapeño peppers, marinated carrots and cucumbers and other vegetables, then splashed with nuoc mam fish sauce and sweet chili paste. The presentation of the artfully stacked sandwich was so beautiful, I felt guilty dismantling it just to wolf it all down. But what the hell.

Maybe the banh mi's popularity isn't so surprising, after all. Columbus Park might have been primarily Italian when Carmelo Guastello opened Gillis Sundries, but in the past few decades, Vietnamese immigrants have settled there, too. It's only natural that a neighborhood hangout would reflect the tastes of everyone who lives nearby. That makes everybody happy.