Brazilian abundance in Queens.

Green Field. Sounds like the name of a vegetarian restaurant, right? But no, it is a cathedral for carnivores. Representatives from every branch of the human family dine here. That's partly just a function of the Brazilian churrascaria's location, in outer Queens?one of the most ethnically diverse zones in the entire United States. Green Field's all-you-can-eat setup would be a draw just about anywhere, though (there are Green Field locations in Hackensack, NJ, Rockville, MD and West Covina, CA as well as Corona). For $23.95, you get the hot buffet, full salad bar and cuts-to-order from a couple of dozen different spit-barbecued meats. It's something to experience.

The ethnic make-up recalls John Rocker's famous rant about the 7 train. Yet my pale party seemed to be the only one that took that route to Green Field. The restaurant has valet parking. It's on Northern Blvd., which is pretty much a freeway this close to Shea Stadium. Green Field's website offers driving directions from every which way?no subway directions at all. Trudging from the 111th St. station in the rain, we realized why. The 10 or so blocks from Roosevelt Ave. to Northern Blvd. are sparsely populated enough to give a Manhattanite agoraphobia. Green Field should probably run a shuttle bus on weekends.

Despite the walk, if you divert your annual office dinner from whatever steakhouse the boss suggests to Green Field, you will score points. The place has the sort of gargantuan elegance guaranteed to make a meal an event. There's no menu. The dining room has one of those waterfalls encased in glass, and a cinema-sized projection tv for major sporting events. It feels like a Long Island wedding.

The cocktails kick ass. The Brazilian national liquor is cachaca?made from fermented sugar cane. Like tequila, it's intensely intoxicating. Unlike tequila, cachaca doesn't come in any fancy, top-shelf guise. Straight, the stuff tastes like rocket fuel. Mixed in the right proportions with passion-fruit juice, coconut milk or classic lime-and-sugar (to make a caipirinha?fake versions of which are increasingly fashionable), it's all pleasure. Be aware that three Green Field cocktails ($7 each) will render even a regular drinker extra-extroverted. Green Field also serves quality sangria for $4 per glass.

Not all the food is good, though some of it is great. That's not enough to recommend most restaurants. And that's exactly why rodizio-style meat service is so beautiful. It combines the advantages of a smorgasbord (you get to scrutinize before you commit) and table service (you're served what you want how you want it, hot from the kitchen). Green Field's staff of roving gauchos with skewers impressed me with their responsiveness. They quickly caught on to my preference for rare meat. We asked about fish, and someone immediately fired up a plank of salmon, just for us. A floor captain spied me checking out the chicken hearts and actually chased the guy with them down and sent him my way. (The servers are supposed to bring meat as long as your table indicator?a tricolor cylinder the size and shape of a saltshaker?is green-side-up. Red means you've had enough meat. My requests might have established me as something of an amber man: "Proceed with caution.")

Best we had was the lamb. It's one of the meats that's often dramatically better when cooked on a rotisserie, though rarely is it so tasty as Green Field's. Turkey is another meat I think of as especially suited to the spit. Like lamb, its finest meat is also the first to go dry, so keeping the cut moving helps a lot. Green Field's turkey was its lowlight, though. Bacon had been wrapped around cubes of white meat and cooked until soggy. The turkey could have passed for tofu.

Most delicious besides the lamb was chicken, marinated and roasted the way the turkey should have been. Most of the beef was overdone, though the one pink cut of sirloin I snared was excellent. The skirt steak we tried was unsalvageable. A pork loin, too, had been neglected until it'd gone gray. It was barely worth a taste. Roast beef was only marginally better.

More tender were some spicy sausages of the Italian street-fair variety, plump and perfectly barbecued. Rabbit was plenty tough, with assertive flavor to match. It was the one meat that seemed just right half-scorched, as if prepared by a caveman. And those chicken hearts? They're toothsome chunks of dark meat, sort of like turkey rump, only leaner. Don't skip them.

The cold salad bar is decent. You might expect iceberg lettuce, but instead there's mesclun. And maki rolls. Green Field is owned by Koreans (from Seoul via Rio). Presumably, a generation of Queens kids will grow up thinking a churrascaria is not a churrascaria without sushi.

Features on the hot buffet include frango asado, which are akin to garlic knots, only they're made of white-meat chicken, not bread. Oxtails stewed with herbs and tomato weren't far from as savory as oxtails get; beef ribs with yucca made for another refined treatment of a stringy cut of meat. The night we visited, there was a yellow seafood soup that tasted as if it was mostly pure mussel liquor?a good thing. Our party split on a Brazilian staple, farofa. The dish is made from manioc (cassava) meal toasted in butter with onion and egg. Green Field's version also has green olives and bacon. The starchy part was sticky, clumping together like fried rice. A companion of mine who lived in Brazil insisted the stuff is supposed to be fine-grained and crunchy. A regional difference, perhaps? It was my first experience with farofa, and I loved it.

Desserts at Green Field come around on a big cart. They appear to be commercially baked. Our wholly unnecessary samplings ($4.50 each) found them to be of slightly above-average quality. Caramel flan was a little more caramel than flan, though light enough. Chocolate cake was moist and fluffy. There was also carrot cake, tiramisu, several cheesecakes, fruit tarts and tapioca pudding. Tell the parking attendant to move the seats back a notch or two, so bellies don't interfere with steering.

Green Field, 108-01 Northern Blvd. (108th St.), Corona, Queens, 718-672-5202.