"This is not the Canyon Store we know and love."
Tommy Bina wrote that line in a Facebook post dated late April 2026, addressed simply "Dear Laurel Canyon." For as long as most residents can remember, if you asked who ran the little brick-and-stone market halfway up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the answer was Tommy's place. He was the man behind the counter, the one who stocked a shelf of imported English candy nobody else in the canyon carried, the name attached to the store's own website. What almost nobody checked until this year is whether his name was ever on the one document that actually determines who is legally allowed to run the store: its liquor license.
It wasn't. That gap, between who the neighborhood believed owned the Canyon Country Store and who California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control actually lists, is why nobody, including forty-year regulars, can say with confidence what happens at 2108 Laurel Canyon Blvd after August 31.
The Counter Still Opens at 7
Walk up to the store this week and nothing about it looks unsettled. Yelp's current listing shows the same hours it has run for years: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. most weekdays, a shorter Sunday close at 9. The page even advertises a new menu. Sandwiches still come out of the deli case. Firewood still sits bundled by the door. If you didn't follow the news out of Laurel Canyon over the past six months, you'd have no reason to think anything was in dispute.
That normalcy is part of what makes this story hard for residents to parse. The store operating on schedule tells you nothing about who is legally entitled to be running it, or for how much longer under the current paperwork.
A License That Predates the Man Everyone Calls the Owner
The store's original liquor license, number 120773, was issued on April 8, 1982, to Houshang Maghen as primary owner, with Manoutcher Shamsa and Kamran Nejatbina listed alongside him as licensees. Tommy Bina has said publicly that he opened the store at that same address in 1982. Both things are true, and neither one puts his name on the license, not in 1982, not in the corporate restructuring that happened in September 2025, not in any filing since.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A liquor license and a storefront's public identity are two separate legal instruments that rarely get checked against each other unless something goes wrong. In a business this small, the person greeting you at the register can be functionally unconnected to the name the state holds responsible for the alcohol on the shelves behind him. For forty-plus years, nobody in Laurel Canyon had reason to notice the gap. The sale announcement is what forced it into the open.
Two Corporations, One Address
On September 5, 2025, license 120773 was transferred to a new entity, Canyon Country Corporation. Houshang Maghen remained on the license as a stockholder, listed as Houshang Eddy Maghen, alongside Kamran Nejatbina. Two new names joined: Eli Bina and Shirley Bina. The corporation's new president is listed as David Manoutcher Shamsa. That transfer, according to Tommy Bina's own account, happened without any notice posted at the store and without his knowledge, despite his having run daily operations there for decades.
Then, on January 21, 2026, a second license was issued for what appears to be the same business, this one to an entirely different entity: Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc. None of the people on that filing, Donald Hannoun as CEO, Brandon Hannoun as CFO, and Ryan Rommy Askar as secretary, appear anywhere on the September 2025 license.
| Filing | Filed | Key Names | Status (as of the most recent public reporting) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canyon Country Corporation | Sept. 5, 2025 | David Manoutcher Shamsa, Eli Bina, Shirley Bina, Houshang Eddy Maghen, Kamran Nejatbina | Active license, set to expire Aug. 31, 2026 |
| Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc. | Jan. 21, 2026 | Donald Hannoun, Brandon Hannoun, Ryan Rommy Askar | Pending, not yet the operating license |
SFGATE first reported the sale on February 6, 2026, after a public application to transfer the store's alcohol license turned up taped near the juice and coffee bar. Neighbors spotted it before the co-owners had a chance to explain it. Tommy Bina posted a video reacting to the notice in real time, and SFGATE reported it could not reach co-owner David Shamsa for comment. The Hollywood Reporter followed up on March 11, confirming the sale and noting rumors, still unconfirmed at the time, that the new owners might convert the space into a straightforward liquor mart. By late April, Bina wrote that he had been told he was no longer welcome inside the store he had run since 1982, that longtime employees had lost their jobs, and that he had retained legal counsel to contest his removal from the corporation.
Why August 31 Is the Date That Matters
Today is August 23. The active license, the one under Canyon Country Corporation, expires on August 31. That gives the current legal operators roughly a week to renew it, let it lapse, or watch the pending Cousins filing move toward activation instead. None of that will necessarily be visible from the sidewalk. The sandwich counter can keep functioning the same way it did last Tuesday even as the underlying legal authority to sell beer and wine at that address shifts under it, or fails to renew at all.
For a neighborhood that treats this store as closer to a living room than a retail stop, that mismatch between visible routine and invisible paperwork is the actual story here. The drama residents have been tracking on social media, the ousted co-owner, the surprise sale, the rumored liquor-mart conversion, sits on top of a much drier and more consequential document trail that most people never thought to pull until this year forced the question.
The Same Canyon That Once Bought a Mountain to Settle a Question Like This
Laurel Canyon has a long history of treating ownership disputes over things everyone uses as worth fighting over in public and in writing, even when it takes years. The Laurel Canyon Association, founded in 1930 and the oldest resident association in the neighborhood, exists specifically to work through exactly this kind of friction between who technically holds title and who the community considers a steward. Its sister organization, the Laurel Canyon Land Trust, formed in 2017, spent two years on advocacy, appeals, and litigation before finalizing the 2018 purchase of land at 2243 Laurel Canyon Boulevard to keep it permanently undeveloped. The Trust's "Let's Buy a Mountain" campaign raised $1.6 million from residents to acquire 17 acres between Lookout Mountain Avenue and Stanley Hills Drive, later expanded by another 9 acres in 2022. More recently, the Trust worked with the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority on Laurel Spring, a 2.4-acre parcel at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Avenue, the same intersection The Hollywood Reporter names as the store's own corner.
None of that history involves the Country Store directly. What it shows is a pattern: when something in this canyon feels collectively owned but is legally controlled by someone else, residents here do not shrug and move on. They organize, they read the filings, and they wait out the process. The store dispute is smaller in scale and privately held rather than public land, but it is unfolding in front of the same community that has already proven it will spend years untangling exactly this kind of gap between who a place belongs to in practice and who it belongs to on paper.
What To Actually Watch For
- Whether the Canyon Country Corporation license renews on or before August 31
- Whether the Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc. filing moves from pending to active in the weeks after
- Whether Tommy Bina's stated legal challenge over his removal from the corporation results in any public filing
- Whether the store's hours, staff, or menu visibly change, which would be the first sign that new operators have actually taken over day to day service
The counter will keep opening at 7 either way. Whether it's still the Canyon Country Corporation's name on the license when it does is a separate question entirely, and one this canyon has shown it knows how to sit with until the answer is actually clear.
Reading a neighborhood closely enough to notice the difference between what a place looks like and what its paperwork actually says is the same instinct that matters when you're buying or selling a home in the hills above it. If you're weighing a move into Laurel Canyon or anywhere else in the Hollywood Hills and want that level of read on a property or a block before you commit, Barry Gray offers a free consultation to walk through what the public record actually shows.
