Filipino Food With Subtlety, and a Splash of 7Up, at F.O.B.

At F.O.B., the shrimp arrive in full armor, with kinked feelers and eyes like capers. Shucked, they taste as if bred on garlic, butter and soy: delicious and familiar.

What makes the dish Filipino — what draws a line from this restaurant in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, to the Philippines, where the chef, Armando Litiatco, was born — is the lemony kick of 7Up. It’s sloshed into the pan until the fizz burns off, leaving a sunny concentrate that lifts the shrimp’s sweetness.

I’m wary of the word “authentic” when speaking of non-Western cuisines. Sometimes the secret ingredient in a country’s home cooking is neither ancient nor indigenous nor “exotic,” but simply cheap and readily available, a legacy, perhaps, of colonialism or globalization. (You want authenticity? Do like my mother, who was also born in the Philippines, and eat the shrimp with the shells still on.)

There’s a kiss of soda on the barbecue chicken and pork skewers, too, the charred meat glossy with 7Up, pineapple juice and Jufran brand banana ketchup. This reminded me, happily, of skewers at the turo-turo (steam table) joints of Woodside, Queens, a neighborhood many Filipino immigrants call home.

Here the meat is more tender, in part because Mr. Litiatco has a more delicate cooking style, honed in the kitchens of Daniel in New York and Boulevard in San Francisco. At times it’s too delicate: One evening, I searched in vain for some of the menu’s promised ingredients, like bagoong (fermented krill), which had been whisked into oblivion in a salad dressing, and liver pâté, which should have brought vitality to kaldereta, a long-simmered beef stew.

Mr. Litiatco explained that he sautés the bagoong first, “to mellow it out,” and goes light on the pâté, perhaps out of consideration for his diners.

Laing, typically made with taro leaves, got “more positive feedback,” he said, when he used kale. In this case, the concession doesn’t matter: The greens are terrific, half-drunk on coconut milk, and a stronger dose of bagoong hints at its time spent undersea.

My favorite dishes had the most outspoken flavors: chicken wings with a faint burn of galangal; bola bola — meatballs spiked with patis (fish sauce) — slipped inside dumpling skins; callos, chickpeas and ham interleaved with tripe brought to a boil three times, until it gives up the fight; and liempo, pork belly best baptized in the accompanying suka of cane vinegar armed with chile.

Mr. Litiatco half-cooks his adobo the night before and lets it rest until morning, a technique he learned from his father, for many years a hotel chef. Some adobos favor vinegar; Mr. Litiatco’s champions soy. If only there were more of it, to spoon over a side of rice.

F.O.B. stands for “fresh off the boat,” which was once a slur applied to unassimilated immigrants, and is now sometimes appropriated by people of Asian descent as a term of pride. It’s an odd name for a restaurant that can err on the side of meekness, as with a bland ceviche of yellowfin tuna, or duck supposedly anointed with patis but bearing no trace of it.

In a recent meal, the flounder came prettily swaddled in banana leaves but emerged spongy. Sisig, the great Filipino pork dish, here made with belly scraps, ears and cheeks, had none of the coveted crunchy, blackened bits.

Mr. Litiatco grew up in Daly City, Calif., which according to the census has the country’s highest concentration of people of Filipino descent. He runs F.O.B. with Ahmet Kiranbay, an immigrant from Ankara, Turkey, who watches over the dining room.

It’s a gracious space, with roomy chairs and light bulbs that rest like cockatoos in wrought-iron bird-cage lanterns. The giant forks and spoons on the wall are the equivalent, for anyone of Filipino heritage, of a secret handshake. Food arrives on grandmotherly, mismatched china; family members beam out from framed photos.

You may end a meal with an immaculate leche flan or a lush shake of ube (purple yam) and chewy tapioca pearls. Or return to the appetizer list for bibingka, a rice-flour cake rich with coconut milk and creamed corn. When F.O.B. opened in November, the cake came with a salted duck egg tucked inside.

“I think it was turning people away,” Mr. Litiatco said. So the egg is gone. What remains is still wonderful, baked on a banana leaf that peeks from the bottom, with a crumble of kesong puti (farmer’s cheese) and coconut butter smeared on top. But I wish some of the diners before me had been more willing to give funk a chance.