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The Inferno Hot Sauce Emporium is the type of shop you wander in to only to get lost in — even though the store measures just seven steps deep and five across.

Hundreds of bottles of hot sauce and meat rubs line the exterior walls. “Colon Cleanser,” reads one label; “Dark Side of the Pepper,” another. There’s one shaped like a hand grenade; another bears a white-sheet-ghost novelty trinket over the lid, denoting a ghost pepper sauce. A tasting table dares customers to try it before they buy it.

Jimmy Cliff plays on a vinyl turntable in one corner. In another sits the proprietor, a middle-aged man with an easy, sly smile that makes you think he knows something you don’t. Brian Hogan’s work uniform is board shorts, a ripped T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a bright yellow trucker hat that reads CRISPY SHRIMP across the front.

But at a cost; the long work hours meant he’d missed much of the first five years of his son’s life. With first grade looming, and with it earlier bedtimes that conflicted with late restaurant nights, Hogan gave up the grind and moved to the beach

“I love the restaurant business,” he said, “but I never figured out how to do it without working all the time. I wanted a simpler life.”

Tybee, the laid-back beach town a 20-mile drive east of Savannah, is a simple place Hogan was familiar with.

His mother’s family was from Savannah and owned a home on the island’s southern tip throughout Hogan’s childhood. Every summer, he fled Decatur for the coast to hang out with his cousins. They spent their days hunting for sharks’ teeth on the beach, exploring the seemingly endless waterways in a Jon boat with a notoriously fickle engine and fishing the tides.

Hogan wanted the same for his son. So in 2018, he and his wife, Emily Hogan (whose property management business allowed her to work remotely), moved their family into the vacation rental house they’d bought for cash from the Shorty’s sale five years earlier.