Zuma, Dubai's Japanese restaurant that made headlines recently for announcing it plans to ban smoking in its establishment later this year, has been listed at number 77 in the top restaurants in the world.
The rank represents the highest placed restaurant in the MENA region - and a jump for DIFC-based Zuma of 10 places from the 2013 list.
Danish restaurant Noma - which has a meticulous focus on simple, indigenous ingredients such as snails, moss and cod liver - reclaimed the title of world's top restaurant.
Noma held the No. 1 spot on Restaurant magazine's annual ranking of the world's best restaurants, sponsored by sparkling water drink San Pellegrino, for three years before being topped in 2013 by avant-garde eatery El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain.
Located on Copenhagen's waterfront, Noma's menu is almost obsessively defined by the Nordic landscape. Ingredients often are foraged nearby and the meals at the 45-seat restaurant - which holds two Michelin stars - are meant to viscerally connect diners to the land and sea.
The restaurant opened in 2004 and gets thousands of reservation requests a day.
Seven US restaurants made the list, with two of them placed in the top 10.
© 7Days 2014
