How Gelila Assefa Puck uses her platform to help communities around the world
By LA Stories Staff Beverly Hills
PUBLISHED 6:00 AM PT Oct. 30, 2023
At just 17 years old, Gelila Assefa Puck left her home in Ethiopia alone in search of opportunity in America.
While she had a great life in Ethiopia, she remembers the horrors of the Red Terror of the communists, her father often protecting her and her three siblings from seeing the worst of it.
In America, Assefa Puck went on to become a model and study fashion design. She had an up-and-coming business designing her own brand of haute couture when a chance meeting with famous chef Wolfgang Puck would change her life forever.
“Wolf came into my life the very same week that my father died,” Assefa Puck said. “I really felt like my father put him in my life before he left.”
On the latest episode of “LA Stories with Giselle Fernandez,” Assefa Puck shares how she would go on to marry Wolfgang and start a family of their own. She left her fashion business behind to work with him as the creative director of the Wolfgang Puck brand. In her role, she is responsible for the design and branding of the company. She brings her passion for the arts into every restaurant, curating the art that goes on the walls of his restaurants around the world like Spago and CUT, often choosing to celebrate new artists.
“I see the restaurant wall as a voice, as a stage for me. How do we use those voices, those stages to connect with the guests?” Assefa Puck said. “I found art to be one of the most powerful tools to communicate messaging, to highlight what is important.”
Today, Assefa Puck not only uses her platform to celebrate the arts, she is also a fierce advocate for women and children both in Los Angeles and in her home country of Africa. She is the founder of the Dream for a Future Africa Foundation, which includes a vocational training center that provides skills-based training in order to help bridge the economic gap in Africa.
In LA, Assefa Puck works with the Children’s Institute, recently bringing in Frank Genry to design their newest center in Watts. She also recently partnered with Shari Redstone to host an event titled Rebuilding Bridges, in an effort to bring together the Jewish and Black communities in order to fight antisemitism and racism through works of art displayed at Spago Beverly Hills.
“It’s a subject that I really want to engage so I can be an example to my children,” she said. “Leaving the world a better place than I found it, so they can also do the same.”