Herzdamen an der Elbe (2013)

The chef Maria Lieblich runs a restaurant serving Austrian cuisine in Dresden with her friends Carola Bleibtreu and Steffi Krieg. The restaurant has not yet become established, however, and the three women are in financial trouble, which they try to resolve with the help of their bank. A regular at the restaurant, the elegant shipowner Hermann Augartner, learns of their difficulties and offers Maria the chance for the three women to cater a large buffet aboard a ship in his paddle-steamer fleet. To buy the necessary equipment, though, they first need the bank to increase their loan. Naïvely, Maria Lieblich accepts the shipowner’s offer after he has charmed her, and relies on his verbal promise. Once they have found a new chef, preparations for the buffet get underway at full speed, thanks to Carola’s efforts. She flirts with the Protestant pastor of the nearby Christ Church (in reality, the Maria am Wasser church) and uses the connection to secure inexpensive kitchen help as a sideline. The residents of a luxury retirement home are promptly persuaded to peel potatoes. In the middle of the preparations, a message arrives from Mr. Augartner: unfortunately, he has to cancel the buffet because the tour group is stuck at the airport in London. With no written contract, he leaves the women stuck with the costs and the food. As luck would have it, one of the retirement-home residents is the shipowner’s mother—and she turns out to own the paddle steamer on which the buffet was to take place. She promptly signs the restaurant owners’ buffet proposal, thereby forcing her unloved son to pay the costs he caused. The women are thus free of their worries about making ends meet for the time being, and can now devote themselves entirely to the restaurant and to the romantic relationships that are beginning to develop or are already underway.