Ed Wary's 'Aiea restaurant, nicknamed "the house that bar-b-que built," is in the midst of a Bar-B-Que Fest with barbecue specials not always on the menu.

He has traveled the country researching the four key regions — Kansas City, Mo., the Carolinas, Memphis and Texas — and continues to take side trips (New Orleans is coming up) whenever he visits the Mainland on business for the National Restaurant Association, of which he is on officer.

The four barbecue belts take different approaches, especially to the sauce they use, but also to how the barbecue is presented.

At Dixie Grill, where every order of barbecue comes with a six-pack of differently flavored house sauces, best selling is the one a Carolinian or a Texan wouldn't even recognize: a local-style sauce with guava puree in it (we bet there's some soy sauce, too).

The sauces represent the regions: Memphis, Savannah, Eastern Carolina, Southwest Texas, Kansas City and of course, the Hawaiian.

General manager Patrick Dolan said the sauces are made in-house and he describes them this way: "Three of them I would call traditional barbecue sauces — sweet, tangy with varying spice. Our Memphis sauce is the least spicy, spiced up with only pepper. The Kansas City and Texas — a bit of an argument on that one. The KC is spiced up with cayenne pepper, which gives it a consistent bite. The SW Texas has fresh peppers — get a hold of one of those and you're gonna get bit.

"Our nontraditional sauces are our eastern Carolina, which is a cider vinegar-and-molasses-based sauce, very liquidy, great on our pulled meats and fish. Our Savannah sauce is mustard-based and we use it on our (pulled) chicken.

"To round it off, we have our Hawaiian sauce, our version of Hawaiian barbecue sauce, with that smoky flavor but loaded with tropical fruit and sea salt."