Nam Gyo - a super spicy tomato and pork blood Thai soup with rice noodles. The Thai place near our office loads it sky high with shredded cabbage and I load it up with chili vinegar. Oh God, the most amazing thing for lunch after a weekend where the wife and I had an argument, and the perfect dish to smash the monotony of everything else in Japan just tasting like the same old kelp or bonito Dashi.
Kinda similar to Vietnamese pho-- another comfort food--a rich beef broth with rice noodle dish. Many friends from Hawaii/California call it the one dish they cannot continue living without-- and I understand the sentiment.
Pad Ki Mao-- super spicy wide wide noodle stir fry, another Thai dish. My college buddies and I always ordered this as the perfect 3am fix to a night of failure to get lucky. lol
Canton style Won Ton Min-- Always the first thing on the must eat list when arriving back in Hawaii. If I find myself in Hong Kong, I find myself eating 2.4 bowls of this a day on average.
Also Dim Sum, and frankly almost anything Cantonese constitutes as a comfort food for me, lol.
Peanut Butter and jelly sandwich never fails to cure a bout of Asia blues and reset an American expat's batteries
Pancit Bihon - a Filipino glass noodle dish where the essence of Chicken fish is captivated in the noodles through simmering them in broth and nam plar until the dish is dry. A squirt of Lemon Juice to top off this amazing Filipino fast food.
Shoyu Ramen would be high on the list if I wasn't living in Japan. Call me a sucker for soul foods, but the most traditional form of a simple straight-forward pork and shoyu broth with ramen noodles and menma bamboo shoots-- magically nostalgic, will put me in my happy place.
Love me some pasta of all varieties. Mac and cheese with chilli flakes, oregano and olive oil makes an amazing comfort food.
Japanese Spaghetti would also be a must on this list except that again... Living in Japan. A lot of Japanese dishes would be that way for me if I didn't live hear. In Hawaii, I grew up with Japanese food making up 40% of my diet, so it can get uncomfortable when it becomes 90%+ of my diet.
If I'm in Japan, I only have Chinese food on the brain. When I was in China, all I could think about was Japanese food. Such is the fate of someone from a mixed heritage. lol
Oh and of course the ultimate breakfast-- corn beef hash, eggs, and Rice, easy over on the eggs with ketchup and Tobasco! Though growing up, I thought this was a white person's food, not knowing that these delicious patties made with corn beef and mochiko before being fried with shoyu in fact find their origin on the shelves of Hawaii Okazu-ya, making them part of the Plantation Era Japanese food culture, my own culture! Thank you Wikipedia lol