Having visited the Phils quite a few times, the food is notably spice-deficient compared to nearly all its neighbors: a typical Filipino dish is flavored with exactly one thing, usually garlic. Also, some of the ingredients used to make up for this blandness are unpalatable/weird to Westerners. Exhibit A is kare-kare, which is peanut butter and oxtail stew served with fermented shrimp paste (bagoong alamang), where the tiny shrimp are still visible, eyeballs and all.
There are "good even if you didn't grow up with it" dishes like lechon (suckling pig), pork & chicken adobo and halo-halo, and some of the modern/upscale/fusiony places in Manila are amazing, but it would still be hard to have a Filipino place that's authentic and appealing to non-Filipino palates at the same time.
There are "good even if you didn't grow up with it" dishes like lechon (suckling pig), pork & chicken adobo and halo-halo, and some of the modern/upscale/fusiony places in Manila are amazing, but it would still be hard to have a Filipino place that's authentic and appealing to non-Filipino palates at the same time.