If you stopped in at the Country Store for a coffee in early February, you may have noticed something taped to the wall near the juice bar. It was a public notice, the kind the state requires before a liquor license changes hands. Most people walked past it the way they walk past everything else pinned to those walls: old show flyers, a faded photo of Joni Mitchell, a clipping about the time a customer in flashy suits turned out to be David Bowie. This one was different. It meant the market at 2108 Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the closest thing this canyon has to a town square, had quietly changed hands.
The story that spread after that was the obvious one: developers are coming, the counterculture landmark is getting scrubbed and turned into another liquor store. That story is not what the record actually shows. The stranger, more accurate version is that two separate ownership groups now have paperwork tied to the same address within four months of each other, and even the man who ran the store for 44 years says he cannot get a straight answer about who is actually in charge.
What the counter has always meant here
The Country Store has operated since 1982 under Tommy Bina, in a building rebuilt in 1930 from stone pulled out of an old riverbed after the original hunting lodge burned. Jim Morrison lived behind it on Rothdell Trail and wrote it into "Love Street" as the place where the creatures meet. Mama Cass lived in the basement for a stretch, a space that today houses Pace, the Italian restaurant next door. None of that is why the store still matters day to day. It matters because it is the one walkable pocket in a canyon where almost everything else requires a car, the spot where you grab a sandwich, pick up firewood, and run into three neighbors before you get back to the register.
That routine is what made February's notice land so hard. Residents describe the market as a living room, not a convenience store, and a living room does not change owners quietly.
The paper trail
Public alcohol license records tell a more precise story than the rumors did. The original license, issued in 1982, listed Houshang Maghen as primary owner alongside Manoutcher Shamsa and Kamran Nejatbina. On September 5, 2025, that license was transferred to a new entity, Canyon Country Corporation, adding Eli Bina and Shirley Bina as stockholders and naming David Manoutcher Shamsa as the corporation's president. Then, on January 21, 2026, a second license was filed entirely, this one to a different corporation with a different set of names attached.
Here is where the two filings stood as of this spring:
| License filed | Entity | Names attached | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept. 5, 2025 | Canyon Country Corporation | David Manoutcher Shamsa (president), Eli Bina, Shirley Bina, Kamran Nejatbina, Houshang Eddy Maghen | Active, expires Aug. 31, 2026 |
| Jan. 21, 2026 | Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc. | Donald Hannoun (CEO), Brandon Hannoun (CFO), Ryan Rommy Askar (secretary) | Filed as pending |
Nobody from either filing overlaps with Tommy Bina, the man whose name has been synonymous with the store for four decades. That absence is the detail that turned a routine succession into a neighborhood story.
Two accounts, one counter
Bina's version, posted to Facebook on the night of April 21, 2026, was blunt. He wrote that new owners had come in and told him he was no longer welcome at the store, that longtime employees had lost their jobs, and that he believed the license transfer months earlier had not been handled properly. "Today is a very sad day for me and for our canyon," he wrote. He said he had hired more than one lawyer and intended to keep fighting for the property he believes he still partly owns.
David Shamsa, 82, gave a different account to The Hollywood Reporter in March. He said he and two other original partners, one also 82 and the other 92, wanted to sell and retire after 44 years running the shop together. He pushed back directly on the idea that Bina had been left in the dark. "If he wanted to buy it himself, he could have," Shamsa said, adding that Bina simply did not have the money. Shamsa also dismissed the liquor-store rumors as untrue.
Both accounts can be true in the way that ordinary family businesses fracture: aging partners ready to step away, a junior partner who wanted to keep going, and a transaction that moved faster than the goodwill holding the arrangement together.
Where it stands today
The September 2025 license, the one tied to Canyon Country Corporation, expires today, August 31, 2026. That expiration does not resolve anything on its own. The second filing, under Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc., was still listed as pending as of the most recent public reporting, and no outlet has confirmed which entity is actually running day-to-day operations behind the counter right now. For a canyon that treats this address as neutral ground, that ambiguity is the actual headline, not a liquor store rumor that the store's own longtime co-owner has denied.
What has not changed, at least based on the most recent listings for the address, is that the counter is still open on its usual schedule, still selling sandwiches and firewood and the imported British candy Bina started stocking decades ago. The patio still functions as a Sunday gathering spot. Whether that continues under the same name, the same hours, or the same face behind the register is the open question the canyon is watching heading into fall.
It is also worth remembering what else this address carries. Bina has hosted the Love Street Festival each June, a small gathering built around the canyon's musical history and the store's role in it. Whether that tradition continues this coming June, under whichever ownership structure wins out, is not something any public filing can answer yet.
Why this is worth watching, not just reading about
Laurel Canyon does not have a chamber of commerce or a business improvement district keeping score on who owns what. It has a handful of institutions that residents treat as fixed points, and the Country Store has been the most fixed of all of them since before most current residents moved in. A dispute this specific, tied to actual license filings and actual named parties rather than vague anxiety about change, is rare. It gives the canyon something concrete to watch rather than something to simply worry about.
If you live along Lookout Mountain or Kirkwood or anywhere else that funnels down to that corner, the honest answer right now is that nobody outside the two ownership groups knows exactly how this resolves. The counter is open. The sandwiches are the same. Whether the name on the license this time next year matches the name on the door is genuinely unresolved.
Steve Frankel has spent more than two decades reading the small, specific details that shape life in canyons and hillside neighborhoods across the Westside, the kind of details that never show up in a listing description but explain why people stay for decades. If you are curious how a moment like this fits into the longer story of Laurel Canyon, or want a straight, discreet read on what is actually happening in any Westside enclave you call home, reach out to Steve Frankel directly.
