Don’t you sometimes want to start at one end of a menu and work your way through? Well, there are several good reasons to actually do so at Casa Brasil, besides it being a buffet — price, opportunity, and some scrumptious offerings.

Admittedly, given the Rhode Island tendency to regard even East Providence as being as remote as the Amazon, that might not be enough to shake some people out of gustatory complacency. But if this place won’t lure them, nothing will.

Understand, Casa Brasil ain’t no lah-di-dah white linen and liveried waitstaff kind of place. It’s as blue-collar and family-oriented as you get — an all-you-can-eat deal at a price that looks like a typo. For $10 you can visit the frequently refreshed steam tables until you’re physically incapable. At that point — although it’s advisable to start earlier — you can avail yourself of the rodizio, endless rounds of skewered barbecue brought to your table until you turn over a marker at your plate from green to red, signaling that you give up. Bring along the neighborhood kids — it’s half-price for those under 12.

In the Brazilian tradition at churrascarias, barbecue restaurants, those markers can be disks or flip cards or whatever. Here they are wooden and vaguely hour-glass-shaped, maybe because proprietor Joe Barros hopes that time will stop for you. Chatting with the guy as he sliced various meats off of the long skewers he brought around to the tables, he said he was disappointed that most customers eat and run rather than stick around for a couple of hours. This from a businessman whose profit depends upon how little his diners consume.

Barros and wife Rose are from Rio de Janiero, and next month will be the first anniversary of their restaurant. The décor is nothing much, a map of South America here, a colorful wall-hanging there. Very little is fried, Joe said, and what is fried benefits from what he calls "my biggest secret" — good quality Portuguese olive oil, which also infuses various recipes and sauces.

Some 42 dishes are prepared over the week, and the menu lists a different array of more than a dozen for each day. That list is a guide rather than a contract, since available ingredients vary, so on the Tuesday we came, there were additions and deletions. Among my favorite meat items: pork in a gravy heavy on the olive oil; delicately spiced stewed beef; roasted white meat chicken, a little dry but flavorful; sliced sirloin; lots of spicy shrimp amid wide wheat noodles. There was rice, deliciously seasoned black beans, something called trooper beans that taste like pintos, fried collard greens, and okra that Southern-bred Johnnie declared she loved. I was smitten by the warm cod-fish-and-rice salad, and the cold chicken salad that contained potato sticks (yes, as in skinny potato chips) called salpicao.

The barbecue takes 40 minutes from the time he puts it on, so if you’re coming early in the evening you might want to call ahead to have him start the charcoal, made from eucalyptus but no longer smelling of Vicks VapoRub. (We arrived at 6:15 and no one had ordered barbecue yet.) What eventually came to our table before I reluctantly pushed away was, in order: a juicy chunk of turkey breast wrapped in bacon; a likewise wrapped piece of sirloin; interestingly spiced chicken wings; slices of sirloin; and pork, lime halves on the drip tray to jazz it up. I would have preferred the beef to be medium — apparently demand or tradition dictates that it be closer to well-done — but there was no faulting the tenderness of the meats.

There are a dozen bottled beers available, Aveleda vinho verde by the glass ($3.50), nearly 20 wines by the bottle for $17 and less, plus some Napa Valley reserves for $40 and under.

As we anticipated, we were too stuffed to finish up with dessert there. But we did sample two of the three $3 temptations we’d been passing in a display case, taking the rest home. Their flan is prepared in a ring-cake pan, and you get a thick wedge that is, as I love it, heavy on the pleasantly burnt-tasting caramelization permeating the top, and has additional, unbaked, caramel syrup underneath. The passion fruit mousse was as generous a portion in a goblet, and the intensity of the flavor was even more impressive.

When we were about to leave, Joe came around with another item on a spit, and having tasted the smoky pineapple on a prior round, we couldn’t resist indulging once again. This response, I suspect, will be that of most people who discover this delightful addition to the local food scene.