What is The Lunch Bag?
The Lunch Bag is a sandwich counter at 8989 E Via Linda, Suite 116, near 90th Street, in a strip of offices and small shops on the main road through Scottsdale Ranch. It serves lunch and nothing else, Monday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and it has done business under this name, according to Phoenix New Times, since 1981.
The people behind the counter are Sandy Sinclair and her daughter Erica LaBate. Sinclair started in restaurants at 15; when the Scottsdale Progress profiled the shop in October 2022 she was 70, had run it with her daughter for 12 years, and said she would never retire. They bought it from a previous owner who had used the same name but, in Sinclair’s words, a different business model, and they rebuilt the trade the slow way, handing out free cookies to the doctors’ and dentists’ offices along Via Linda for a year or two until the offices started phoning in orders. There are no employees. Two women make every sandwich.
The menu is 14 signature sandwiches, each with a bag of Lay’s: the New Yorker (hot pastrami, Swiss, house coleslaw and Thousand Island on toasted rye), the Turkey Green Chili with pepper jack and salsa mayo, the Tuna Ciabatta with house albacore salad, a Reuben, a California BLT, an Italian Stallion, a double-decker club and a Veggie Freak, plus salads, wraps, build-your-own and daily soups. The sandwich the press singled out is Mom’s Homemade Hot Meatloaf on toasted sourdough, which New Times named one of the Valley’s 15 essential sandwiches in 2016 and again in 2019. Cookies and brownies are baked in house. Meat, Sinclair told the Progress, is cooked locally and never frozen.
It is for the Via Linda medical corridor and the neighborhood around it: office workers at noon, retirees who have been coming for years, and Mayo Clinic families looking for something that is not a hospital cafeteria. The Progress’s headline, “like Cheers without alcohol,” is the right description. Our verdict: a small, honest lunch counter with one celebrated sandwich and two owners who know your name, which is rarer in this part of town than it should be.
How to eat at The Lunch Bag
Order the New Yorker or the meatloaf. The New Yorker is the shop’s own pick, the sandwich on its home page, and the hot pastrami with slaw and Thousand Island on rye is the thing to try first. The hot meatloaf on sourdough with lettuce, tomato and mayo is the one with a press record, and it reads like a Sunday-dinner sandwich because that is what it is. The Turkey Green Chili, turkey with green chilies, pepper jack, lettuce, tomato and a salsa mayo on sourdough, is the only sandwich on the board that could not come from anywhere but Arizona. The Tuna Ciabatta, with albacore salad, red onion and Italian dressing on toasted ciabatta, is the lighter order and the shop’s other named signature.
Know the format. Every signature comes with chips, and a half signature with chips is the “lighter side” option. Salads run from a garden salad to a chef’s, a Greek, a cranberry-walnut and a Trio with scoops of egg, tuna and chicken salad, all three made in house. Wraps repeat the salads in a tortilla. Build-your-own lets you pick meat, bread, toppings and dressing. Drinks are canned soda, fresh lemonade, brewed black tea and flavored cold brew. The restaurant’s menu page lists no prices, and neither did the 2022 profile, which only said “quality food for a good price”; expect a sandwich-and-chips lunch, not a deli-platter bill.
Timing. The window is short: 10:30 to 2, Monday through Saturday, closed Sunday. The offices hit at noon, and with two people making everything, the line moves at a human pace. Order ahead by phone at (480) 860-6659, or arrive before 11:45 or after 1. Breakfast is long gone; Sinclair told the Progress a $3 breakfast sandwich could not pay for itself.
Takeout, delivery and the car. About 90 percent of the business is repeat customers, and most of it goes out the door. New Times noted free local delivery; the Progress reported third-party delivery apps and a habit of walking the order and the card reader out to customers who would rather not get out of the car. The site offers a separate catering menu for office parties and events, which is the business the medical corridor runs on.
Getting there. The shop is in a one-story strip on the north side of Via Linda just west of 90th Street, with free parking in front. From Shea Boulevard turn south on 90th; from the 101, take Via Linda east. The Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch is a mile and a half east if you want a sit-down lunch instead.
A lunch counter that outlived the suburb’s first wave
Scottsdale Ranch was new in the 1980s: a master-planned community of lakes and cul-de-sacs sold to families moving east from Phoenix, with Via Linda as its commercial spine. A sandwich shop called The Lunch Bag opened on that spine in 1981, by the date New Times uses, which makes it one of the oldest continuously named restaurants on the east side of the city. What the record does not tell us is who opened it. The Progress profile of 2022 mentions only “a previous owner” with “a different business model,” and no earlier press we could find names that person or says whether the hot meatloaf dates to the beginning.
What it does tell us is how the current version was built. Around 2010 Sinclair and LaBate took it over, kept the name and started over on the customer base, giving away cookies to the nearby offices for a year or two until the orders came in on their own. By 2022 the business was 90 percent regulars, roughly 10 percent people who searched “sandwich shop near me,” and zero employees, which Sinclair called a well oiled machine. They dropped breakfast, kept the house soups and salads, and baked their own cookies and brownies. The pandemic, Sinclair said, did not shake the regulars.
The press file is modest and consistent. New Times put the meatloaf sandwich on its essential-sandwiches list in December 2016 and kept it there when the list was updated in December 2019; the paper’s hot-pastrami-day roundup also included the shop. The Progress profile of October 7, 2022 is the only full feature. Since then the record is the restaurant’s own site, which carries the current hours and menu, and Yelp, where the listing was updated in April 2026 with more than 230 reviews. Nothing we found reports a sale, a move or a closure.
The shop belongs to a Scottsdale category the city does not advertise: the lunch counters that serve the medical offices and the retirees of the Shea and Via Linda corridors, places like Goldman’s Deli a few miles west, where the question is not the chef but whether they remember how you take your tuna. See our hotels near Mayo Clinic guide if that is what brought you to this part of town.
Honest assessment: this is a two-person sandwich shop with a three-and-a-half-hour day, and it should be judged as one. The New Yorker and the meatloaf are good enough to drive for; the rest of the menu is solid lunch-counter food, the room is small, and if you arrive at noon you will wait. We would rather eat here than at any chain on Shea, and the fact that the same two women have made every sandwich for sixteen years is the whole argument.