A Hong Kong food critic isn’t impressed when I tell her I am making a special trip to Macau to eat at Fernando’s. “The restaurant lets dogs lie around the floor,” she complains. “And the salt and pepper shakers are plastic.”

“What about the food?” I ask her.

“It’s Fernando’s,” she says with a shrug. “Big sloppy portions and baskets of bread. It never changes.”

Until recently, little changed in Macau, the former Portuguese colony across the mouth of the Pearl River from Hong Kong. But with unification on December 20, 1999, the city was declared open for the de facto business of modern China: rapid, no-holds-barred transformation. In the case of Macau, the principal business is gambling, and the plan involves reclaiming more land to build more casinos and hotels. More mainland Chinese are also being brought in to admire the old churches and squares and then settle in at the “hungry tigers” – the slot machines.

Within an hour of stepping off the hydrofoil, I am cornered by a journalist with Jornal Tribuna, one of four daily papers serving the nearly 10,000 Portuguese residents left. He has been waiting to interview a tourist for a column. The journalist asks if I think there are too many casinos going up and too many mainlanders flooding the streets.

“The changes are inevitable,” I reply.

“Don’t Hong Kongers come here for peace and quiet?”

“They’ll have to go somewhere else.”

Next he asks where I am headed. I tell him.

“Colôane,” the journalist says, naming the island where Fernando’s is hidden. “The last refuge of sleepy Macau. Better hurry,” he adds before taking my picture.

Macau consists of a peninsula and two islands. Though the total area is only 25 square kilometres, for centuries the islands, Taipa and Colôane, were places apart. Taipa, now connected to the peninsula by two bridges, is mostly apartment blocks along with the university and airport. Thanks to landfill, Colôane is no longer surrounded by water. Riding a minibus across the causeway, I take in the sight of an apparent missile launch pad under construction as well as signs promising a golf course, another hotel/casino and a project called TV City. The launch pad, I later learn, is a stadium for the 2006 Asian Games.