À la carte À la carte In restaurants, à la carte is the practice of ordering individual dishes from a menu in a restaurant, as opposed to "table d'hôte", where a set menu is offered. It is an early 19th century loan from French meaning "according to the menu". The individual dishes to be ordered may include side dishes, or the side dishes may be offered separately, in which case, they are also considered "à la carte". The earliest examples of "à la carte" are from 1816 for the adjectival use ("à la carte meal", for example) and from 1821 for the adverbial
A la carte pay television CNBC. Hence, bundling has not been just a marketing choice for distributors, but a contractual obligation. Industry resistance to a la carte programming in the U.S. has been entrenched even during downturns. In 2011, for example, a combined loss of 1.2 million subscribers to Comcast and Time Warner Cable prompted rumors that program distributors themselves would push to unbundle at least some of their services. Cable analyst Craig Moffett argued that a modified a la carte model, consisting of smaller programming tiers, was more economically feasible for distributors and customers alike. At the time, Time Warner Cable experimented with such