Want a Drink at Mr. Li’s Bar? Please Climb Through the Window

Authorities ordered Mr. Li to remove his makeshift steps to the bar, which he operates out of a space meant for residential occupation.

Visitors enter Jian Guo bar through the window at left. Photo: Chao Deng/The Wall Street Journal

He complied. Then he put two wooden stools and a table in their place for people to step up on through the window.

“It’s a bit of an issue when customers get drunk,” he says. Some tipplers, he says, lie on the couch inside until sober enough to climb out.

At Modernista , a live-jazz bar and restaurant, authorities ordered the entrance to the club sealed, leaving open an adjacent door to the restaurant.

To hear the club’s music, guests walk through the restaurant, up stairs, through two lounges and a door to get to a balcony overlooking the stage. To get closer, a spiral staircase leads down to tables next to the bandstand.

Giacomo Oreglia, an Italian student at a Beijing university, had to ask where the stage was on a recent Sunday night. He wasn’t sure his date would be able to find the way. “I hope he kind of figures it out.”

When construction workers bricked up the entrance to Zhang Chuanxing’s restaurant in a residential building, he hung up a lightbulb and a piece of scrap wood outside with “eatery” scribbled on it by the old doorway.

A restaurant continues to operate with its front filled in. Photo: Chao Deng/The Wall Street Journal

He hoped guests would be alert enough to turn into his courtyard and find the back door next to the restaurant’s kitchen. “It’s harder to find us but we have no choice,” he says. “This is the country’s policy.”

One night, frequent patron Peng Longjie couldn’t find the new entry after the main entrance got bricked in. He called a friend for directions. “No door?” he says. “I was super surprised.”

Beijing’s anti-door drive is part of a plan to reduce overcrowding, rehabilitate neighborhoods and remold the city into a modern capital worthy of China’s new global power.

“That vision,” says Jeremiah Jenne, a historian and Beijing tour guide, “does not necessarily include funky cosmopolitan mixed-used space.”

Notices from one government office involved in the urban-renewal campaign and plastered around the city last year urged locals to “beautify every corner of the capital.” It listed 10 forbidden activities, including operating illegal businesses and “opening holes in walls”—an allusion to unauthorized entrances.

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“Beijing is a respectable capital and we should protect its real identity!” ran the notices from the Office of the Committee for the Capital’s Spiritual Civilization Construction. (The Beijing government didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“I think they want to give the hutongs a high-level feel,” says cafe owner Ning Zhu of the changes in her traditional courtyard neighborhood. Authorities removed a small porch outside her entrance in 2016, she says, then sealed up the front door last October.

“This is just the beginning. They’ll go step by step.”

Many of the affected businesses sprouted during the rapid growth in the millennium’s first decade, when officials seemed eager for private entrepreneurship.

Some local business operators say officials won’t provide a clear explanations for the policy change. That is where countermeasures come in.

Improvised signs have sprung up to show businesses holding on: “Vegetables Here,” “Open for Business,” “Side Door” or, more simply, an arrow indicating the way to the back door.

A hotpot restaurant, bricked up, does business through a window. Photo: Jady Liu

A hair-salon owner plastered more than two dozen sheets of paper along her alley’s brick walls, directing foot traffic into the courtyard home with instructions: “Professional Haircuts / Enter the Yard / Walk to the end / Turn right / Enter the red door.”

Neighborhood officials are on the watch, patrolling to collect evidence of businesses with too many signs.

A disgruntled tailor says he took all his signs indoors when officials came to do inspections last spring. The posters lie tossed in one corner of his shack, just large enough for a single bed and sewing-machine table.

Spools of thread indicate a tailor shop. Photo: Chao Deng/The Wall Street Journal

Outside his window, to show customers he is open for business, he secured spools covered in bright orange and blue cotton thread.

The front entrance to one of Shi Xinzhong’s popular dumpling restaurants in a residential area has been bricked over. Hanging on a side door is a board on which he has lightly scribbled “business closed.” Which isn’t true. Through that door, he pushed aside a thick curtain to show guests eating.

Shi Xinzhong at his original dumpling restaurant before the bricking-up. Photo: Chao Deng/The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Shi's dumpling joint, bricked up in 2016. Photo: Shi Xinzhong

State-run Beijing Television ran a report about a police officer making friendly rounds in the neighborhood. Video showed him shaking Mr. Shi’s hand when the restaurant got bricked up. It reported that the officer helped Mr. Shi understand the government’s cleanup.

The report irked Mr. Shi, who says it wrongly said he created an illegal front door years ago. “What nonsense!” he says. “There was a door when I came.”

Mr. Shi says he has been forced to close down three street-level dumpling joints and is trying to hang onto the remaining three. He recently opened a new outlet—his first in a shopping mall.

Write to Chao Deng at Chao.Deng@wsj.com