HONG KONG — Nam Kee Noodles is a typical Hong Kong restaurant: functional, popular and busy.

A dozen plastic-topped tables offer room for about 40 patrons. Customers line up outside at lunchtime, waiting to consume spicy noodle soup, dumplings and iced soy milk amid the clatter of plastic bowls and chopsticks.

In April, however, the little restaurant, in the heart of Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong’s busiest shopping districts, nearly had to shut down after the landlord tripled the already-expensive rent.

“We were paying around 200,000 dollars a month,” said Au Kei-hong, the shop’s manager, referring to an amount in Hong Kong dollars equivalent to about $25,800. “But the landlord then increased it to 600,000. It was too expensive. We cannot afford that.”