à la carte

alternative a la carte · alternative à-la-carte

1. not comparablefood and drinkAllowing selection from a fixed list of individually priced options shown on the menu.

   The restaurant had a huge à la carte menu and four specials that day.

   Antonyms: table d'hôte

2. broadlyfigurativelynot comparableSelective; only choosing what one likes or desires.

   1 more example

   As twin studies proliferated throughout the nineteen-eighties, their results contributed to substantial changes in our moral intuitions. When schizophrenia and autism, for example, turned out to be largely heritable, we no longer blamed these disorders on cold or inept mothers. But, for such freighted traits as intelligence, liberals remained understandably anxious and continued to insist that differences—not just on a group level but on an individual one—were merely artifacts of an unequal environment. Conservatives pointed out that an à-la-carte approach to scientific findings was intellectually incoherent.

   2021 September 6, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?”, in The New Yorker

   Synonyms: cherry-picking

3. Philippinesnot comparableparticularly in restaurantsA meal but only the viand (without rice).

alternative a la carte · alternative à-la-carte

1. not comparableBy ordering individually priced items from the menu.

   DCI Tom Barnaby: You don't do eye of newt or toe of frog, wool of bat or tongue of dog, then? Waitress: Not à la carte, sir.

   1998 May 6, Douglas Watkinson et al., “Death in Disguise”, in Midsomer Murders

   1 more example

   There were two divisions in the restaurants I used to visit. One division, which was patronized by fairly well-to-do people, provided any number of courses from which one chose and paid for à la carte, each dinner thus costing from one to two shillings. The other division provided six-penny dinners of three courses with a slice of bread. In my days of strict frugality I usually dined in the second division.

   1925-29, Mahadev Desai (translator), M.K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Part I, chapter xvii

   Antonyms: table d'hôte