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 from a la carte, including those who have opted out of bundled channels, but might subscribe to just a few, as well as subscribers with no interest in sports. Casual sports fans, on the other hand, could pay a higher rate. By 2013, the outsized cost of sports programming paid by distributors and passed on to subscribers had influenced the debate. The Needham study maintained that the creation of a separate sports tier would reduce industry revenues by $13 billion. Cable pioneer John C. Malone stated that, for subscribers uninterested in television sports, "runaway sports rights" costs amounted to "a