Looking up from our table at Thor last week, Nosher and I noticed an uninterrupted view of a decidedly New York City cityscape: a brightly lit series of tenement fire escapes just on the other side of the restaurant’s expansive back skylight. It was a vertiginous and disorienting view, as if we had stumbled onto the backstage of Rent– and it’s a view that contrasts both with Thor’s other-wordly interior and earthbound cooking, the latter with obligatory references not just to Hapsburgian Delikatessen (chef and owner Kurt Gutenbrunner also owns German accented Wallse and Café Sabarsky) but also, unexpectedly, to France and Italy.

We were there with our friends Schnicksy and Pescatore, happily liberated for the evening by a babysitter. Fortunately, they did not have to venture far, as our friends count themselves among the lucky many increasingly calling the burgeoning culinary mecca of the Lower East Side their home. Thor occupies a strange territory in this world, one that juxtaposes slick glass architecture and still-grotty street scenes, and it barely manages to pull the trick off, as Pescatore commented when we walked from the soggy, grey street through the building’s white entrance tunnel and into the leather-appointed bar area looking out to the street. We were there for an early dinner and the complete absence of other diners made the bar look more like an airport lounge circa 2050 than a comfortable and convivial place for drinks. Happily, my espresso martini had enough kick to make me forget the upholstery and bring me back to 2006.

Once Nosher and Schnicksy arrived and we found our table, our server and menus launched us into disorienting orbits all over again. With a studiedly casual manner and perfectly disheveled hair, our waiter could have walked straight out of an episode of The O.C.. And the menu he handed us prompted too many questions: with so many categories (cold plates to start, warm plates in the middle, dishes from the market, hot plates), were we supposed to order two courses or three? Where were the main courses? Would a restaurant named after a Norse god serve tapas? (On this last point, we soon discovered that any link to mythology is pure coincidence; ‘Thor’ is an acronym based on the name of the venue: The Hotel on Rivington.)

In the end, we ordered a little bit of everything, although our plates ended up with more surf than turf. I started with the foie gras terrine, which turned out to be one of the better choices of the night. Smooth and gamey, the duck liver paired nicely with slices of poached bartlett pears and a lemon and fig reduction. Smallish even for an appetizer, it was gone in an instant, which made giving little tastes to our dining companions tricky.

But not all of our starters were worth sharing: both Nosher’s Bibb lettuce salad and Pescatore’s black squid pasta were oversalted in the extreme–don’t get me wrong: we love salt and have been known to point out where there needs to be more of it (see our recent reviews of Levain and Buttercup Bake Shop). But it is also possible to use too much salt. In Thor’s case, we started to think that someone in the kitchen might be trying to escape a run of bad luck by throwing the stuff over every shoulder.The pumpkin seed vinaigrette on the salad should have been a delicate counterpoint to the greens, but the seeds were dusted with salt and the entire mass was liberally sprinkled with fleur de sel, making the whole thing impossible to eat without frequent sips of water. Nosher’s salad also suffered from being an entire head of Bibb lettuce served on a tiny plate, which forced him into contortions in an attempt to eat it. Pescatore’s pasta was actually an order of magnitude more salty than Nosher’s salad; Pescatore, who rarely complains, said he could barely taste the squid and scallops, let alone the other ingredients in the dish. And what a shame–the presentation and aromas made this seem like the most promising thing we ordered to begin our meal.

Schnicksy’s beet terrine was better, certainly less salted, and beautifully presented. Goat cheese, beets and a hint of horseradish combined in a smooth swirl of flavors alternately sweet and savory, if a little one-dimensional. A brush stroke of beet reduction sped across the plate, echoing presentations at fellow Lower East Sider WD-50. A crisp wafer of beet teetered on top of the terrine slice, and from the other side of the plate came texture in the form of a jumble of peppery mache.

When it came time for our main courses, I ordered a sweetbread and spinach spaetzle special, in the process quietly horrifying our mostly vegetarian (well, pescatarian) friends. The dish was about twice as large as anyone else’s and this fact, in combination with my usual chattiness, left me eating after everyone else had finished. I wanted to like my entrée–sweetbreads are a favorite of mine and are far too rare at New York restaurants, but, like our appetizers, it was completely, disastrously oversalted, blotting out the delicate flavors of the organ meats and the pillowy soft spaetzle.

Nosher enjoyed his brook trout well enough, though not nearly as much as he had hoped, finding it both a little greasy and smallishly portioned. The fish was exceptionally fresh, however, and sat in a creamed spinach purée, dotted with tart caperberries. Schnicksy’s red snapper was better: steamed to just tender and, while its green sauce looked similar to the spinach from Nosher’s trout, it was a traditional basil pesto. Underneath, it managed to hide a good number of artichoke pieces and little neck clams in its multiple folds. Schnicksy declared this a good choice–and Nosher (who normally does not like red snapper very much) agreed.

For his part, Pescatore lived up to his name and ordered the lobster from the ‘Hot Plates’ section of the menu. This was a half lobster, poached and removed from its shell, then topped with a rich Bernaise sauce, bing cherries, and fava beans. The combination of fruit and creamy sauce was an inspired idea: mixing colors, textures, and sweet with savory. A pity, then, that the portion size was more appetizer than main course. We were lucky that we took our server up on his suggestion that we order a small bowl of special quark (a low-fat white pure curd cheese) spaetzle– those of us left a little peckish after our mains nibbled at it before dessert. I liked it despite the fact that its taste bore a very strong resemblance to boxed macaroni and cheese.

After a meal of small plates, we required few entreaties to order dessert. We opted for two desserts: twin kumquat dumplings, fried crisp like elephant ears sidled up to an equally intense scoop of kumquat-infused ice cream, and Thor’s deconstructed ‘Snickers’ bar. Here, finally, was where Thor acquitted itself well. The two plates worked wonderfully in perfect counterpoint to one another and could not have been more different–Pescatore and I happily see-sawed back and forth between the two desserts, moving from gooey, nutty, and fudgey ‘Snickers’ to refreshingly tart kumquat and back again until Nosher and Schnicksy caught on far too late and asked where the two desserts had gone.

Walking back out through the white tunnel in the foyer and wandering into the night, we chatted about the meal. We agreed that Thor seems to be very much a product of its time and place. It seems perfectly positioned to appeal to wealthy Lower East Side scenesters in search of an exclusive-feeling bar and a self-consciously complicated menu. But for us, the pretty pricey food (appetizers were in the teens and mains were in the 20s) and too-often careless cooking left us feeling as if a night at Thor is a bit of a gamble. We’d much rather just sit with a drink and take in that sodium-lit urban vista out back than battle with sodium in our dinner.

Thor, 107 Rivington Street (at Ludlow Street), 646-253-6700