Elisabeth Furse’s favourite clients were young men on the verge of making a name for themselves. They were the journalists, politicians or socialites of the future. If they had a name already from their families then so much the better. If they were attractive, better still. She had the knack of answering the needs of the glitterati of SW1 and SW3 without ever being part of Swinging Chelsea. The Bistro was happily over the border in Belgravia. Nor did she seek the Kings Road style, although some of those who began the evening in then fashionable pubs such as the Markham Arms might well have ended it with Elisabeth Furse in Bourne Street.

The late Peter Jenkins, one of her favourites and a regular when he was on the Financial Times, described the Bistro in a glossy magazine of the time as "a club hideaway . . . a debating society . . . a womb to climb back into . . . a state of mind, not a catering establishment". Few went there just for the food. Although no one ever found a dead mouse in his stew, one customer did complain about a rusty nail in his goulash — and was told by Elisabeth that "iron is good for you". She was well known for putting leavings from customers’ plates into a large bowl for the next day’s soup.

She was not universally loved. Like Muriel Belcher of the considerably more raffish Colony Club in Soho, she ran her operation entirely according to her own rules. Both patronnes could be abusive to those whose faces did not fit, and both were distinctively cavalier with bills, often directing them to those "selected" to pay rather than those who had incurred them. Nevertheless, the list of Furse customers, the "Bistro Boys (and Girls)" published at the end of her unreliable memoirs, Dream Weaver, written with Ann Barr, makes a formidable roll-call.

The Bistro had begun as a shop selling prints and antiques, run without much success by Elisabeth’s third husband, Pat Furse. She turned it into a coffee shop, with a Gaggia machine, which at £12 was the most expensive item on the premises, in 1953. Rebuilding on the Bourne Street site in 1970 forced its closure, however. Elisabeth Furse tried to restart it on the first floor of a Kinnerton Street pub, but the operation did not work. The Bistro Boys were just not pub people and she decided to cater no more.

Elisabeth Furse was a child of the eastern Baltic, born in Köningsberg, East Prussia, in 1910. Her parents were both Jewish, her mother German, and her father from a comfortably-off merchant family in Riga. They moved to Berlin when Elisabeth was still a child, and in that city she first demonstrated her independence and unconventional streak. She developed a schoolgirl crush on Elisabeth Bergner, which the actress — who was well-known for her bisexuality — did everything to encourage, even to the point of offering to adopt her admirer from the Baltic.

Instead, Elisabeth took up with the young men of the Berlin Communist Party, including Willi Koska and his close associate Walter Ulbricht. Before long she was known as "Rote Lisl", graduating from being a Girl Friday to a cover courier escorting those hunted by the Nazis across the Swiss border. In order to be more effective for the Communists, she took English nationality by marrying a party colleague, Bertie Coker, at St Pancras Register Office in 1934.

Since the going was now too hot in Germany, she stayed in London and worked in the film industry. This brought her into contact with the Haden-Guest family and in particular Peter, then still an undergraduate, who hoped to become a ballet dancer. They lived in Paris together in the period immediately before the war, and had a son, and when her divorce from Bertie Coker came through, they married in 1939.

The war quickly separated them, however. He decided to go to America, while she was determined to stay in Europe to take part in the anti-Nazi struggle — and to keep her baby son with her. When the Germans conquered France she set up home in Brittany, claiming American nationality and therefore neutrality. Her cover was blown, however, and she was sent to a prison in the Jura. She managed to escape, though, and made her way to Marseilles in Vichy France. There she helped Allied airmen on the run until once again she was arrested.

A certain amount of diplomatic pressure and the use of the Haden-Guest name got her out of France with her son, via Lisbon and back to London. (She was careful to say nothing about her Jewish ancestry or her Communist connections.) Her reception from the Haden-Guests was mixed, however, and her husband was still in America, teaching dance. So she scraped a living in wartime Britain by returning to the film industry and doing the occasional broadcast.

She came into contact with the Furse family by selling one of her possessions to Patrick Furse, then an art student. His family were keen on etiquette, which she was not, but there were strong artistic links, since a cousin of Pat’s was Olivier’s stage and film designer Roger Furse.

When Pat came out of the Army in 1946, he and Elisabeth set up home in Trevor Square. He went to Chelsea Art School, and sold some pictures, while she continued in the film industry, and although they were poor, they used some Furse family money in 1952 to buy a 20-year lease on a house in Bourne Street. It was only an artisan dwelling, but at least it was in Belgravia.

When the lease was up and the Bistro closed, a chapter of Furse’s life closed with it. She began to hold dinner parties instead, in her unbelievably chaotic flat, inviting old friends but also new acquaintances whom she thought promising. She also followed the careers of her Bistro Boys, and in particular that of David Owen, one of her especial favourites, who wrote fondly about her in his memoirs. There were reunions — Bistro Balls — given in the French Church off Leicester Square, attended in due course by the sons and daughters of the Bistro Boys. There was still goulash, but no rusty nails. Things were not the same.

Divorced three times, she is survived by her son from her second marriage, and by three daughters and a son from her third marriage.

Elisabeth Furse, restaurant owner and adventuress, was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) on August 30, 1910. She died in London on October 14, 2002, aged 92.