English-speaking sushi bars usually call their temaki hand rolls, although “hand-rolled sushi” would be a closer translation. Unlike the spicy tuna maki that are tightly rolled up with a bamboo mat and then sliced into six or eight tidy drums compressed inside a skin of nori, temaki are shaped by fingers and palms, without the aid of any tool. They tend to have a slightly loose, casual appearance; like silk scarves on the shoulders of Parisian women, their nori wrappers seem to have fallen into the right position by accident. Because of this, temaki also have a tendency to unwind themselves, which is why they are generally passed straight across the sushi counter, from the chef’s hand to yours and from there, ideally, into your mouth.

At most omakase sushi parlors that roll will resemble a small ice-cream cone, with nori serving as the cone. For some reason, New York’s leading temaki bars use a different configuration: DomoDomo on West Houston Street, perhaps the first example of the genre, uses an open-ended cylinder that looks like the barrel of a gun. So do the Sugarfish spinoff KazuNori, in NoMad, and the Daigo Hand Roll Bar in the DeKalb Market Hall in Brooklyn.

Nami Nori has a temaki construction style of its own. Each square of seaweed is not wrapped or rolled, but softly bent into a U. Warm rice runs down the hollow. On top is what in sushiland is called the neta, the main ingredient. Naturally, yellowtail-scallion is an option, along with spicy tuna, or salmon with avocado or cucumber. Like the California roll, these are well-prepared if a bit tranquil; any one will do if you want to see a familiar landmark at the table.

The crab dynamite roll sounds as if it’s in that category, but the mall-sushi favorite has been stripped down to its impure essentials: snow crab and tobiko mayonnaise, broiled and pinched together in nori to which grains of puffed rice have been stuck.