Everyone Calls It Tommy's Store. The License Never Did.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Ask a longtime resident of Lookout Mountain Avenue or Kirkwood Drive who owns the Canyon Country Store, and the answer comes without a pause. Tommy. Tommy Bina, the man behind the counter who has spent decades pointing tourists to the English candy aisle and letting neighbors run a tab when they were short on cash. That certainty ran so deep that when a notice appeared taped near the store's outdoor coffee bar in early February, most people in the canyon skipped past who the buyer might be and went straight to a harder question: how does someone sell Tommy's store without Tommy knowing?
The paperwork behind that counter tells a stranger story than the one the canyon has been telling itself. Tommy Bina, as far as public liquor license records show, has never actually held ownership on paper. That gap between the store everyone believes in and the store as it exists in filed corporate documents is the real thing worth understanding here, more than the sale itself.
The first sign something had changed wasn't an announcement. It was a single sheet of paper, a public notice of application for a change in the market's alcohol license, posted beside the juice and coffee bar outside the store's front door. An employee confirmed to a reporter that a sale had gone through. Co-owner David Shamsa didn't respond to requests for comment. Tommy Bina posted a video reacting to the notice in real time, telling neighbors the store had been hurting financially and asking them to keep showing up.
Within weeks, the Hollywood Reporter had confirmed that the sale was real and that rumors were circulating about the space becoming a liquor store instead of the market people had known since the 1960s. Shamsa later dismissed that particular rumor as false. What he did not dismiss, because no one asked him to on the record, was the license history sitting in state files the whole time.
California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control keeps a public record of who holds the right to sell liquor at a given address, and that record for 2108 Laurel Canyon Boulevard tells a story that predates this year's drama by more than four decades.
Read that list again and notice who is missing. Not in 1982. Not in the 2025 transfer. Not in the 2026 filing. Tommy Bina, the man whose name is on the store's own website as its longtime owner and the person every regular in the canyon would name first, has apparently never been a licensee of record at the address he's spent his life running.
That doesn't mean he had no stake in the business. It means the informal authority residents granted him, built through decades of remembered orders and extended credit, never lined up with the legal structure of who actually controlled the asset. When that structure shifted, nothing in the public record required anyone to tell the man the neighborhood considered the owner.
There's also a detail worth sitting with given today's date. The license held by Canyon Country Corporation, the one issued in that September 2025 transfer, is set to expire on August 31, 2026. That's days away. Whether Canyon Country Corporation renews it, or whether Canyon Country Cousins Liquor Inc., the entity licensed back in January, becomes the operative business at that address, isn't something the public record answers yet.
Whatever the license says, Tommy Bina's account of what happened to him personally is the part that has actually moved people in the canyon. In a message shared with neighbors, he said the transfer happened without proper notice and that he'd been removed from the corporation, the store, and the license itself. He told the Hollywood Reporter his partners had sold the store "without my knowledge or approval." He said he now has legal counsel looking into it.
The part of his account that lands hardest isn't about ownership structure at all.
Many longtime employees, people we all know and love, have also lost their jobs.
That's the sentence that turns a corporate filing dispute into a neighborhood story. The people behind the deli counter, the ones who knew your sandwich order and your dog's name, weren't parties to any license and had no say in a transfer that cost some of them their jobs.
Once word spread that the sale had happened, the specific fear that took hold was that the space would stop being a market at all and become a straightforward liquor store, stripped of the deli counter, the firewood bundles, and the patio where people have traded gossip for sixty years. The Hollywood Reporter ran with that rumor in March, tying it to a longer list of vanished Los Angeles landmarks. Shamsa pushed back directly, calling the liquor store rumor false.
No public reporting since has confirmed a change in what the business actually sells or how it operates day to day. The counter still turns out sandwiches. The firewood baskets are still out front. The imported British candy is reportedly still stocked. What's changed is who is behind that counter making decisions, and how much say the community that treats this place as its town square actually has in that decision.
If you drive up from Sunset today, the store still looks like the store. The murals are still there. Jim Morrison's old house is still a short walk up Rothdell Trail. Pace, the Italian restaurant that now occupies the basement where Cass Elliot once slept, still serves dinner most nights of the week. None of the physical texture that makes this stretch of the canyon feel unlike anywhere else in Los Angeles has visibly changed.
What has changed is quieter and harder to see from the street. A business that residents assumed was privately, personally owned by one familiar face has turned out to be, and to have long been, a multi-party corporate holding whose internal structure the public never had reason to examine until a piece of paper forced the question. The employees who lost their jobs in the transition didn't get a say in a filing made under a corporate name most of them had probably never heard.
The instinct in a story like this is to treat it as a landmark-in-peril narrative, the kind Los Angeles tells often, about a beloved place threatened by faceless new ownership. That version isn't wrong, but it undersells what the license records actually reveal. This wasn't a beloved local business quietly absorbed by an outside chain. It was already a corporation, held by a small group of stockholders, for at least the last four decades. The neighborhood just never had reason to look at the paperwork, because the person behind the counter made the ownership feel personal even when it legally wasn't.
That's worth remembering the next time a favorite spot in the canyon, or anywhere in Los Angeles, feels permanent because the same face has greeted you there for years. Familiarity isn't a legal instrument. The people who make a place feel like home aren't always the ones whose names are on file with the state, and the gap between those two things usually stays invisible until something forces it into the open.
For now, the counter is still open, the bench out front still fills up most mornings, and the canyon is doing what it has always done best: paying close attention to the small changes that tell a bigger story.
If you're weighing a move to Laurel Canyon, or trying to understand what makes a specific stretch of the Hollywood Hills tick before you commit to it, Brianna Deutsch has spent nearly two decades reading Los Angeles neighborhoods at exactly this level of detail. Let's Connect.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Whether acquiring a landmark estate or preparing to present your property to the global market, Brianna Deutsch provides the expertise, loyalty, and discretion required to navigate Beverly Hills real estate at the highest level.