According to many, durian is high up on the list, but I’ve never eaten or smelled it. Cheese may qualify, but the odor generally doesn’t really linger.
I’m eating ika (dried shredded cuttlefish) right now and I’m always reminded how my ex would get some too just to kill the odor. In a movie theater, someone rows away could be eating it and you’d know.
I haven’t had it in decades because of the lingering smell, but when I was young we used to eat whole dried cuttlefish which we cooked over the open flame of our gas stove. It stunk up the entire house, inside and outside!
Another common movie theater food in Hawaii is kaki mochi/arare which is fried or grilled mochi with, usually a soy sauce based coating. I don’t know what makes it so smelly, because regular mochi is fairly odorless, but kaki mochi has a distinctive odor when chewed.
I’ve had durian. The smell is something like an onion that’s just starting to go bad. It’s definitely not as foul as surstromming, but it definitely lingers in the air for long after it’s gone.
Not really 'stinky, but if I make barbacoa in my instant pot, my kitchen well smell for a day or two.
Same with using a deep fryer. Back when I had one, I eventually found that using outside was a good way to keep the house from smelling like fried food for days.
Just remembered a non-stinky food too. I made Portugese Bean Soup in my slow cooker once in my old apartment. Even with the kitchen windows open, the smoky odor lingered for days. I’ve never made it in a slow cooker since.
A sandwich place near where I work has an exceptionally strong garlic sauce. Even when I ask them to use about half the normal quantity, and my sandwich tastes like they followed that request, I’m burping garlic all afternoon. Good food there (except the burgers), but remarkably strong garlic sauce.
I like garlic. Roasting a whole head, then eating the resultant paste spread on bread is delicious. But I used to work with a woman who was made nauseous by the odor. When I’d eat roasted garlic she could tell the next day.
Any indian food with fenugreek in it. Makes your whole house smell like an indian restaurant for days. To the point that, despite my great love of indian food, fenugreek is now banned from the house.
Someone in my dorms used to cook (or reheat) fish on a hot plate… Not only did the RA have to tell her, multiple times, that she needs to stop because it makes the entire section of the dorms smell awful, but also, you can’t have hotplates in your room.
I have zero interest in fish. The smell of someone cooking (or worse, reheating) it is offputting to me. Not to the point where I’m going to make a big deal about it if they do it once in a while, but it’s still not great.
I think the bigger question is, does microwaving fish cause more of a smell (ie does it waft further from the microwave) than, say, someone reheating tamales or a frozen lunch (ie Lean Cuisine type meal) that’s in there for more than 30 seconds?
IOW, if I reheat fish in the microwave for one minute and the next day reheat mexican food for one minute, can you smell the fish, but not the mexican food or can you smell both but the fish smells worse so people are more vocal about it?
Honestly, I think fish smells better than a lot of the stuff some people bring for lunch. Someone where I work has lately developed a fondness for something that smells like sauerkraut, which to me smells awful.
I don’t regularly eat it, but I have several times in the past. Long ago I worked at a small business owned by a Korean guy who brought homemade kimchee into work. It smelled like very ripe garbage. I seriously thought at first that someone needed to take out the trash. It tasted good though!
I love tsukemono (Japanese pickled vegetables). My favorite is pickled daikon, but man, that stuff can be pungent. The brand I bought most recently was stinking up the refrigerator, despite it being double-bagged in ziploc freezer bags. So it was banished to the little apartment-sized fridge in the garage, where we only keep bottled water. It stunk up that fridge, too. The daikon was eaten up a month ago, but the smell in that little fridge still lingers.
I like fish. But can’t stand the smell of it cooking in the house and the way that it lingers for days. So at home, I’ll open a can of tuna. Mostly I’ll eat fish when we go out for dinner. Fish reheated in the m/w at work always smells like the Boston fish market in August.