From Bethesda Magazine: Welcoming Six Ways to Sunday

After a series of delays, the charming restaurant entered the Bethesda dining scene in April

By

July 2, 2026 10:30 a.m.

Share

For a time there, it seemed that Six Ways to Sunday was destined to be a perpetual rumor, never a reality. 

When Satang Ruangsangwatana and Lekki Limvatana—who made their names with the Fat Nomads food truck, pop-up and supper club—signed a lease in downtown Bethesda in November 2023, they had no idea how tortuous the road ahead would be.  

Four months after signing, the chef-partners took to social media to announce, giddily, the news of their imminent launch. But that spring 2024 debut never happened. Summer came and went. The space was ready to go—curiosity-seekers could peek through the plate-glass windows and see the plum-colored walls—but on a routine preopening visit, inspectors commanded the chefs to install new grease traps. A simple-sounding fix, except that the only way they could conform to code was to gut an already-built kitchen. From there, everything bad only compounded. The delay meant no imminent income, which meant the chefs had to take on piecemeal consulting work to keep money coming in to pay for the renovation, which moved forward in fits and starts. Investors and partners, having grown frustrated, bailed, setting the project back even further. All the while, the delay seemed only to whet the public’s appetite, which Ruangsangwatana sought simultaneously to stoke and to suppress. This kind of tease can be carried out only for so long before an audience goes from eager to skeptical, and by the end of 2025 many area food lovers were prepared to suspend their belief in the Six Ways project. 

Fortunately, the restaurant opened in April, and even more fortunately, the will-they, won’t-they is no longer the most compelling story here. 

- Advertisement -

Service in the early days had its issues, the cocktails are on the skimpy side, and the dining room is infernally loud when it’s packed, but there’s no one cooking like this in the area. 

Six Ways calls its cuisine Sino-Siamese, but that descriptor doesn’t begin to convey just how distinctive these dishes are. To call them “authentic” (that oft-cited but much-misunderstood word of culinary and cultural expression) is a misnomer, because as much as they’re rooted in traditional approaches and, in some cases, inspired by family recipes, they’re also highly personal statements, sharp with idiosyncrasy and sneaky with surprise. At its best, the cooking here constitutes a category all its own. 

There are a number of familiar sights on the menu, among them the shumai, the chili wontons and the Odean satay (skewers of long-marinated grilled pork and a zesty, coconut curry sauce). All worthwhile, but they’re not why you’re here. 

You’re here to submit to the unfamiliar—to the Lobak Dumplings, for instance, which use bean curd skin as wrappers and taste like a cross between shrimp toast and fried chicken. Or to the Shrimps Kari Rice, whose astonishment is not the shrimp alone (quick-blanched in hot oil to give them a barely poached quality) but the curried egg paste, a fluffy mix of whipped eggs, roasted chili jam, soy sauce and butter, that animates every bite of the steamed white rice beneath it. Or to the Beef Chu Chi, made with slow-cooked shanks given a crusty sear and served atop a panang-like curry (minus the peanuts) built with three forms of coconut (coconut cream, coconut milk, coconut sugar). It might look, in the dim light, like every other red curry you’ve had, but (and permit me to indulge my synesthesia) it tastes as if all the knobs on the soundboard have been turned all the way up (hat tip to the assertive use of kaffir lime leaves). Remember that moment of revelation you experienced the first time you ever dove into a bowl of Thai red curry? This dish will bring it back. 

Sponsored

Introducing The Devlin Estate

Maryland Dog Bite Laws: What Victims Need to Know About Liability and Compensation

Featured Now

 Where the kitchen stumbles is in sometimes relying on a meat to carry too much of the load in a dish—as in Five Cups Duck Confit (a confited duck quarter atop a nest of marvelously springy, chewy Cantonese noodles), which is merely good, not great: The meat isn’t luscious enough for having slow-cooked in its own fat. A tataki of beef, grilled and served in strips, is sliced too thick and cooked too long but the sauce is a marvel: delicate, complex and umami rich. 

In general here, the saucier the dish, the better. I tell you that because it’s likely that some of these dishes won’t be there when you go, as the chefs refine their roster. So look for those plates that are flanked with a dip, or that have been long-marinated, or that promise to be blanketed. 

As striking as this food is—not just in mixing Thai and Chinese approaches at the stove but in taking street food principles and adapting them to fine, or finer, dining—the space makes no less of a statement. In a Bethesda awash in slick, impersonal concepts, it’s wonderfully downscale, and I mean that in the best way possible. Ruangsangwatana and Limvatana have conjured, with their floral wallpaper, wainscoting and antique wooden cabinets, an authentically homey, almost grandmotherly vibe. The soundtrack, which shifts from Leon Bridges to Jane and the Boy, is delightfully aberrant in context, and the most conspicuous concession to contemporaneity. 

Oh, and how’s this for an even more throwback touch? At a time when many restaurants have primed us to expect that a starter should cost $20 and an entree $50, nothing on the menu goes for more than $24 (though, to be fair, most of these dishes are sized between a starter and a main course). That’s the best kind of retro, and all the more reason to rejoice in the too-long delayed arrival of this delicious charmer of a restaurant. 

 Six Ways to Sunday, 8003 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda, 202-770-5578, sixwaystosundaymd.com

- Advertisement -

This appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

Digital Partners

Originally published at Bethesdamagazine