If you've stopped at the Canyon Country Store for firewood on your way up the hill, or grabbed a sandwich off the porch before a Sunset Strip commute, you've probably heard some version of the same rumor this year: the store is closing, or worse, it's turning into a liquor store. Neither is quite what the record shows.
What actually happened at 2108 Laurel Canyon Blvd, on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain Avenue, is a slower, more procedural story than the one traveling around the neighborhood. It involves two separate ownership filings, a longtime co-owner who says he was cut out of both, and a storefront that, as of this writing, is still ringing up sandwiches and firewood under a new menu. The paperwork moved faster than the facts did, and if you live in the Hills, that gap is worth understanding, because it's not the only one this year.
Two Transfers, Not One Sale
The neighborhood alarm started in February 2026, when a posted notice near the juice and coffee bar flagged an application to transfer the store's liquor license. Tommy Bina, who opened the store in 1982 and has run it for 44 years, said on social video that he learned about the filing the same way everyone else did, by reading it on the wall.
The actual license record, tracked through California ABC filings, shows this wasn't one clean sale. It was two.
The first transfer, dated September 5, 2025, moved the license to a new entity called Canyon Country Corporation. That filing kept most of the familiar names. Houshang Maghen, one of the original 1982 licensees, stayed on as a stockholder. David Manoutcher Shamsa, another longtime co-owner, became the new corporation's president. Two new names, Eli Bina and Shirley Bina, joined as stockholders. On paper, this looked like a family restructuring, not an exit.
The second transfer is where things actually changed hands. On January 21, 2026, a new license was issued to a different company entirely, Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc, with an entirely new set of officers: Donald Hannoun as CEO and Brandon Hannoun as CFO. None of the names from the September filing appear on this one. Tommy Bina's name doesn't appear on either.
By April 21, 2026, Bina made the outcome public himself, posting that the new ownership had told him he was no longer welcome at the store and that several longtime employees had lost their jobs. "This is not the Canyon Store we know and love," he wrote.
Months earlier, in a video asking neighbors to keep showing up, Bina had put it more plainly: "Please come and support your neighborhood store so we stay in business."
What Rumor Got Wrong
The Hollywood Reporter's item on the sale carried word that the new owners might convert the space into a liquor mart. That's a rumor, not a filing. Nothing in the ABC record specifies a change of use, and a license transfer, even one that swaps out every officer, is a corporate event. It tells you who owns the entity that holds the permit. It doesn't tell you what happens behind the counter.
What happens behind the counter, as far as the public record shows, is business roughly as usual. The store's own listing still shows regular hours seven days a week as of this August, and its Yelp page currently advertises a new menu rather than a closing notice. The deli counter, the coffee cart, the imported candy aisle that regulars have joked about for years, all of it appears to be operating. The dispute is over who controls the entity, not whether the doors are open.
That distinction matters if you live nearby, because it changes what you're actually watching for. The thing to track isn't whether the store is "closing." It's whether the corner's daily rhythm changes: hours, staff you recognize, what's on the shelf. So far, according to the store's own current listing, that rhythm hasn't shifted.
Half a Mile South, the Same Problem in Reverse
Laurel Canyon isn't the only spot in the Hills where the sign and the reality have drifted apart this year. Runyon Canyon's West Trail tells the opposite version of the same story.
The West Trail closed after the Sunset Fire tore through roughly 43 acres of the park in January 2025, part of a blaze that prompted evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents across the Hollywood Hills. The closure was meant to let the burned hillside recover. It ran well past a year.
By February 2026, WeHo Times reported that hikers were back on the West Trail, with the perimeter fencing removed and the route open again, though a handful of sections along it remained restricted. The catch was that the city's own recreation website kept listing the trail as closed even after the fence came down. AllTrails was still flagging the West Trail as inaccessible as of March 2026, a month after locals were already using it.
So in Laurel Canyon, the paperwork suggested change before anything visible happened. Half a mile south at Runyon, the official closure notice kept saying "closed" after the actual reopening had already happened on the ground. Different directions, same lesson: in this part of the Hills, the sign and the situation don't always move together.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
Neither of these stories is really about a country store or a hiking trail. They're about how slowly official information catches up to what's true on your own street, and how easy it is to fill that gap with the worst version of a rumor instead of the actual one.
If you want to check either of these for yourself rather than take the neighborhood's word for it:
- For the Country Store, look at its current posted hours and menu rather than secondhand chatter. A business quietly changing its offerings shows up there before it shows up anywhere else.
- For Runyon Canyon, treat the LA Parks website and trail apps as a starting point, not a final answer. A fence coming down, or going up, is often the more current signal.
- For anything involving a business license, remember that a transfer of ownership on paper is a separate event from a change in what the business actually does day to day.
None of this requires real estate intent to matter. You live here. The store you rely on for firewood and the trail you rely on for a Tuesday morning workout are both, right now, telling you two different things depending on where you look. Knowing which source to trust is just part of paying attention to a neighborhood that changes in these small, unannounced ways more often than people assume.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually happening on your own hillside, rather than what's rumored to be happening, that instinct tends to serve you well here in other ways too. Barrentine Group spends most of its time in these same canyons and flats, and we're always glad to compare notes on what's real and what's just circulating. Work With Us whenever you're ready to talk about the Hills, whether that conversation starts with a listing or just a question about your own street.
