A big outdoor restaurant, where you can get a cheap and tasty dinner tailored to your requirement, where there’s always plenty of cold beer, and where you’ll soon be clinking glasses with complete strangers sitting at the same table. Your food is fried in woks over roaring gas burners, with the cook often a little pink-cheeked later in the day after regularly refreshing himself with Tsing Tao.

What’s not to like?

Sadly, such Hong Kong restaurants – dai pai dongs – are in demise. This is a shame as they are fun, inexpensive, and full of character. They offer a dining experience found in few other places; something different for locals and tourists alike.

Dai pai dongs have a long history, going back to the 1930s. The name – which literally means “big plate stall” in English, refers to the special license plates that were issued for “fixed-pitch” stalls (as opposed to itinerant hawkers) after World War II.

They became very popular in the 1950s and ’60s, but in later decades the government tightened regulations on hygiene, and stopped issuing new licenses. The number of dai pai dongs has been declining ever since. When I first came to Hong Kong in 1990 they were still fairly common; now there are only about 25 left.

But there’s a bigger picture to this than just dai pai dongs. The efforts by successive administrations to eradicate these cheap-and-cheerful eateries reflect an apparent wider obsession with sterilizing all the character out of Hong Kong. Over the decades dozens of magnificent old buildings have been torn down and replaced with homogenous office towers. Itinerant hawkers selling tasty snacks are all but gone, driven into extinction by over-regulation.

Small picturesque rivers have been turned into slab-sided concrete eyesores. Spiralling rents force mom and pop out of their corner shop, only to see it replaced with a 7-Eleven (which, incidentally, almost always charges more for its drinks and snacks than mom and pop ever did).

The Urban Renewal Authority rips up characterful older neighborhoods and replaces them with yet more shopping malls. This not only destroys cultural heritage, it destroys communities: the compensation offered to those affected is seldom enough for them to remain in the district.

Yes, some ageing tenements are in a bad state and need to be replaced, and yes, dai pai dongs were not exactly spotlessly clean. But that doesn’t mean everyone wants to live in a brand-new tower block or eat in an immaculate five-star restaurant.

Dogmatic and unimaginative officials are in danger of removing all the quirks and characteristics that make Hong Kong such an interesting place. I was never worried about hygiene in dai pai dongs; they may have looked a bit grubby, but the tables were clean and besides, it’s hard to believe any germs could survive being fried in that red-hot wok.

A few years ago, the then financial secretary John Tsang thought it would be a great idea to introduce food trucks to attract tourists. He’d seen them while overseas, thought they were pretty neat and could help preserve Hong Kong’s food culture.

They didn’t. Food trucks are alien to our culture, the scheme was badly thought-out, and a minor disaster for all concerned. If we want to preserve the unique and attractive things about Hong Kong, a better place to start might be to stop getting rid of them.

Tourists can find shopping malls or a McDonald’s in any big city around the world.

But they won’t find a dai pai dong.

(Alex Price is a journalist who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over 30 years.)

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