Cafe St. Petersburg, soon to be known as Zodiac, has new owners and a new look.

They’re hoping to add something new to the Newton restaurant scene: an upscale Eastern European restaurant.

“We don’t have many good Russian restaurants in Boston,” said Evgeny Sherer, who is the restaurant’s entertainment director.

While Cafe St. Petersburg has been open for 30 years, the new owners wanted to refresh the feeling and make it more high-end.

“It’s a little bit of a different concept,” said owner Genna Itskin.

Many of the other Russian or Eastern European restaurants that were previously in the area have closed as their elderly immigrant proprietors died or retired.

“There isn’t such a big immigrant community anymore, so we lost a lot of Eastern European restaurants,” said Itskin.

But the immigrants that the Boston area does have are hungry for their homeland’s food. This is a cuisine that can be highly varied. “You have five different people with the same ingredients, you get five different borschts,” said Itskin.

So far he’s had a positive response, including from people who were familiar with the previous restaurant.

“We have a good chef,” he said.

Itskin is Jewish, and while they’re not a kosher restaurant, they did have a special Rosh Hashanah menu. It led him to add gefilte fish to their year-round menu due to customer request. Christian immigrants from Eastern Europe have also been pleased by the restaurant. “They miss it,” Itskin said about the food they’re used to. “We think we can be a big addition to the Russian-speaking community in Massachusetts,” he said, especially since they have two large rooms and space for 140 people. He’s had people come to celebrate a birthday or other life events, and they’re already over half booked for Mother’s Day. They also have jazz and piano nights, as well as karaoke.

They also want to appeal to American customers, who make up about 50% of their client base.

“We Americanized some traditional Russian food to suit American tastes, like Chinese restaurants do,” said Itskin. The menu has items like pickled zakuska (sour cabbage with tomatoes, cucumbers, and mushrooms) and forshmak (herring mouse, rice chips, caviar, scallion, and chicken tartare) as well as more familiar fare like chicken kiev and beef stroganoff.

The brunch menu has eggs benedict and avocado toast as well as oladushki and blini, which are similar to pancakes.

The restaurant also has a full liquor license and offers some items that are harder to get in the US, like blackcurrant infused vodka and Obolon, a Ukrainian beer. They even have a shot that mixes vodka with evaporated borscht. But there are also more standard American drinks like lager and cider.

The owners decided to change the name to Zodiac because people know Cafe St. Petersburg, and they want to build their own legacy as a restaurant. But it’s also a way to create more unity in a time when people from other countries in Eastern Europe don’t like Russia very much.

“The old name didn’t go very well, because of the war. Some of the people from the Ukrainian community refused to come because of that,” said Itskin, whose wife is a Ukrainian from Odessa.

Itskin had no prior restaurant experience, and has experienced the difficulties all restaurant owners are having trying to find staff in a tight labor market. But so far it’s going well.

“I try to make people happy,” he said.

Cafe Zodiac is located at 57 Union St. and is open Tuesday through Friday from 5 to 10 p.m., Saturdays from noon to 1 a.m. and Sundays from noon to 10 p.m.