Lex Eats Local: The Sunshine When He’s Gone

The Shams sisters pose in front of their father’s portrait.

Boise’s Sunshine Spice Bakery & Cafe is filled with art, but perhaps the most meaningful piece in its sea of handmade jewelry, ceramics, and drawings is a small painting of a middle-aged Afghan man hanging behind the counter.

It’s a portrait of Seyed Amir Muhammad Shams — the father of the cafe’s four owners, sisters Homeyra, Bahar S. Amir, Khatera, and Narges.

Without Seyed Amir Muhammad’s strong principles, Sunshine Spice wouldn’t exist.

“We left Afghanistan because my father was like, ‘I want my daughters to be educated, finish their schooling, and be [people] who can help the community and be helpful in this world,’” said Homyra Shams.

At 29, Homyra is the youngest of five Shams sisters, four of whom run Sunshine Spice. She was born in Afghanistan in the ‘90s and was just 2 or 3 years old when the Taliban seized power in 1996. The oldest of the Shams sisters, Sadeqa, was already a doctor and decided to stay in the country to help her patients. But the rest of the family fled, immigrating to Iran, Turkey and finally the United States to escape the Taliban’s forced child marriages and ban on education for women.

“‘Girls 14 or over should marry,’ that’s what they said. But my dad was like, ‘No, I can’t do this to my daughters; I want them to get educated.’ He was a car mechanic in Afghanistan. He had his own business, so we sold everything and then moved to Iran,” Homyra remembered.

Sunshine Spice Bakery & Cafe, just before opening.

The Shams family arrived in Idaho in 2003 and learned to read, write, and speak English.

Although the Taliban features heavily in Homyra’s childhood memories, that trauma doesn’t undercut her love of Afghan culture. No matter where they lived, the Shams family carried a piece of Afghanistan with them. They spoke their native language of Dari at home and cooked traditional meals like aash (noodle soup) and mantoo (savory dumplings). The four refugee sisters opened Sunshine Spice to share their heritage and uplift those left behind in their home country.

“First, our intention was to create a place that could help us and also help women in Afghanistan,” Homyra said.

The bakery’s name, “Sunshine Spice’’ is an homage to the saffron the Shams sisters import from Afghanistan with the help of Sadeqa and her daughter. Buying the spice helps create jobs for Afghan women.

“In Afghanistan when women lose their husbands to war, illness, or anything else they become widows and then their family will not accept them. So they will be all by themselves with the kids, so they have to find a way to work. And the saffron field is one of the opportunities that women [have to] work, because only women work in saffron fields,” Homyra said.

When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in August 2021, Sunshine Spice’s imports ground to a halt. The regime forced Sadeqa to stop her hospital work, and exporting saffron became too dangerous for her daughter.

For now, Sunshine Spice has enough saffron on hand for its signature dishes like saffron lattes, saffron green tea, and saffron pudding — a chilled dessert made from whole milk, rosewater, corn starch, sugar, saffron, pistachio, and cardamom. But the supply isn’t enough to fulfill the Shams’ latest dream: launching their own saffron green tea brand to further benefit Afghan women.

“We even made the boxes for it. We were almost getting them out, and then the Taliban came,” Homyra said.

If things don’t change in Afghanistan soon, Sunshine Spice may have to source saffron from another country. Meanwhile, the sisters are helping their fellow refugees in other ways. They collect winter clothes for local refugees and send a portion of their profits to Sadeqa in Afghanistan, along with customer donations collected in a box at the register. She has used the money to support more than 15 families impacted by the Taliban.

Seyed Amir Muhammad Shams passed away in 2020 from sudden cardiac arrest, but he lived to see his four daughters attend college at Boise State University and open Sunshine Spice in December 2019. Continuing to run the cafe in his absence has been hard, Homyra said, especially because COVID-19 forced Sunshine Spice to close for five months. But Seyed Amir Muhammad’s memory pushed the sisters to reopen and gave them fresh purpose.

“When we lost my dad we knew that we wouldn’t have business here [because of COVID-19], but it was really hard for us to stay at home and live with my dad’s memory. It was really hard, so we had to come to work and keep ourselves busy,” Homyra said.

Walking into Sunshine Spice, it’s clear that the Shams sisters have taken great care with every aspect of the eatery, from the painstakingly crafted opera cakes and passionfruit and pistachio tarts in the case — which look worthy of a French patisserie — to the paintings, hand-lettered Afghan special menu, and mural of a woman’s profile on one wall. Every sister lends her talents to the cafe differently: Bahar develops recipes and does the food photography, Khatera is the chef and barista, Homyra manages the front-of-house and Narges runs the kitchen.

Khatera prepares a saffron latte.

“Because we moved to different countries we didn’t get to make friends, so we were kind of like each other’s friends. We have always been together,” Homyra said of her sisters.

Pre-COVID, Homyra and Narges also invited local artists to hang their work in the bakery, but contributions slowed down as the pandemic raged. For now, their own art in a variety of mediums lines the walls, including Homyra’s portrait of their father.

Even in death, he’s behind the register cheering on his daughters’ success.

This article was originally published in the “Lex Eats Local” column in Boise Weekly. Read it here.