There’s a new sushi restaurant in Newton: Lab 13 Handroll, located at 210 Boylston St in Chestnut Hill.

With limited seating and each customer attended to by a chef, it offers a premium sushi experience that can be found elsewhere in the United States but, until now, has yet to be available in the Boston area.

The owner, Jun Zhang, has been involved in numerous other Boston-area Asian restaurants offering hibachi, noodles and Korean barbecue. But he wanted to branch out. After experiencing the restaurant scene in New York City, he realized there was one thing that Boston was lacking: handroll sushi.

This style of sushi is wrapped into a cone shape and eaten by hand, as opposed to the smaller, bite-sized sushi maki roll pieces eaten with chopsticks that are a familiar staple at Japanese restaurants.

“I wanted to bring something from New York that’s not really done around here,” Zhang said.

After about a year and a half of planning, his restaurant opened in August. He had visited Newton for other reasons, and thought it would be a good fit for this kind of food.

The restaurant has a limited menu: ten types of handroll sushi, and four types of sashimi (sashimi, like nigiri sushi, is raw fish, but it does not have rice). But this is because he wants to focus on offering high quality food.

“We use three types of vinegar—it’s a more complex sour taste, and not just white vinegar and orange,” Zhang said.

Sushi comes from the Japanese word for ‘vinegared,’ and so the sourness is an essential aspect of the dish. “The rice isn’t as sweet as other places.”

Zhang is also pleased by being able to source good fish, which is local when it can be. Tuna, for example, is seasonal: right now, New England is lean and so Spanish tuna is the ideal choice, but in a few months New England tuna will be back on the menu.

He knows this can be challenging for customers, who are accustomed to the often large menus of other Japanese restaurants and are surprised by being presented with such limited offerings. But he’s had a positive reception so far, which he also attributes to having hired some well regarded local omakase chefs (another type of Japanese restaurant where the chef selects a series of menu items for the customer). The restaurant also has a full liquor license, with several premium sake options available.

Moving into the high-end restaurant sphere and the expectations that come with it has also been challenging for him, especially because, with a small space, everyone can see everything. But ultimately Zhang is glad he was able to open the restaurant.

“I’m doing something that other people aren’t doing–that makes me happy,” he said.