Boss selling restaurant to help pay waitress’s medical bills

Brittany Mathis's boss is using proceds from the sale of his restaurant to pay her medical bills.

We've written about plenty of big tips here, but restauranteur Michael De Beyer's gesture to a waitress as his fine-dining restaurant beats them all: he's selling the place to help her pay her medical bills.

Montgomery, Texas, teen Brittany Mathis has a ping-pong-sized tumour in her brain.

The 19-year-old doesn't have health insurance and hasn't yet signed up for the Affordable Care Act. Brittany, her sister, Kay, and her mother, Barbara, all work at the German establishment Kaiserhof Restaurant and Wunderbar. They can't afford to find out whether or not the teen's tumour is cancerous.

Because they have no health insurance, specialists have not been returning their calls, Barbara told the Courier.

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Mathis' father, John, died of a brain tumour in 2000.

"I guess sort of the same thing Brittany is going through," admitted Barbara. "I just want her to get help."

So restaurant owner and family friend De Beyer is stepping in — in a huge way.

De Beyer has been trying to sell his family's restaurant for a few years. Now he's upping his selling efforts with the intentions of donating the profits from the sale to Brittany.

"I just can't be standing by and doing nothing," De Beyer told KHOU 11 News. "I have to try something because it's not right."

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"Here's a family, they really work hard they have a lot of stuff against them in the past and they are not holding their hand open they didn't even ask anybody for help," he added.

De Beyer believes the restaurant he's owned for 17 years is worth up to $2 million.

'I have listed my restaurant for several years and recently turned down an (owner-financed) offer for $1.3 million," he told the Courier. "But now I want to auction it off at a reserve price (or minimum bid — 50 percent of the actual value) and anything above that will go to help Brittany."

"I really think it’s an amazing blessing and can't thank him enough and his family," Brittany told KHOU 11. "Never thought that anybody would do that and he did and it makes me feel really good."