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 entertainment cable channel is $280 million, which would require at least 165,000 viewers to break even. Based on 2012 viewership, that would leave about 56 channels standing. Analyst Laura Martin recommended that the current business model of bundled tiered subscriptions be kept with no changes. In a May 2014 "New York Times" column, Josh Barro pointed to academic research concluding that an a la carte system would not benefit customers. A typical subscriber, he wrote, would pay ""slightly more" on cable under an unbundled system, while watching slightly fewer channels." A 2011 Stanford University study cited by Barro simulated a