IF YOU’D seen the pictures of guests at a launch party eating sushi off the body of an (almost) naked lady, you might be forgiven for thinking Southport’s Vincent Hotel wasn’t an obvious business lunch destination.

But fear not – high-profile gimmicks aside, the Vincent makes an eminently stylish place for lunch.

The place may attract some of Merseyside’s A-listers and WAGs, but LDP Business wasn’t there to check out its most expensive dishes. Instead I wanted to see whether the Vincent’s V-Café & Sushi Bar could offer an affordable business lunch.

My guest on this fine spring morning, proudly sporting his I Love Southport badge, was Southport Business Enterprise (SBE) manager Jim Breen.

New Yorker Jim has been a Southport resident for some 17 years and for the past six has been charged with promoting the town as a great place in which to live, work and do business.

He says he has seen the resort change greatly in recent years, and is hopeful that there is more to come as Southport bids to cement itself among the region’s top shopping destinations.

The resort may be best-known for its old-fashioned charm, but the Vincent, with its contemporary feel, means it can now cater for the most design-conscious traveller.

Jim said the Vincent was seen as a breath of fresh air in Southport – and as a Japanese food fan was pleased to hear it was also a sushi specialist.

He said: “We have a lot of hotels but we hadn’t had a big new hotel for a long time, so as a boutique hotel it was a welcome addition.”

The menu offers a broad choice of Japanese-style options, as well as a wide range of other mains, but this time we went for the lunchtime meal combos. I went for the soup and a sandwich option at £6.95, while Jim unsurprisingly chose the soup and sushi at £7.95.

While we waited – not for long – Jim told me about his badge. It’s part of a campaign from SBE’s marketing working group to encourage locals to shop in Southport and attract visitors to the resort.

Its work has been enthusiastically backed by local media. LDP Business’s sister title the Southport Visiter has been running its own parallel Shop Local campaign since November, and is a partner in the I Love Southport campaign.

Jim, whose wife’s family hail from the area, moved to Southport in 1992 when he was working for a financial services firm in Manchester and says he was already an evangelist for the resort before he joined SBE.

“Southport is a fantastic place by the seaside,” he said. “There’s nowhere else like it in the country.

“People love Southport for different reasons. The whole idea of the badge is ‘I Love Southport because....’ because of what?

“People might love Southport because of the shops, or the seaside. I love to play golf so I’m spoiled for choice. There’s a lot of things about Southport to enjoy.”

Our food arrived swiftly, with our respective soups alongside our mains.

I was served a bowl of creamy vegetable soup. That sounded too wintry a soup for a sunny Southport day, but in fact it was a light concoction that went down a treat.

Jim said his Oriental chicken soup was almost a meal in itself.

“It had a real spiciness to it but it was very light and full of fresh vegetables,” he said.

Our conversation moved on to SBE’s other activities.

SBE’s environment and safety group aims to make the town a safer and more attractive place to visit, with work improving lighting and other street furniture.

Its Retailers Against Crime team brings together the police and the business community to run the town’s security radio network.

SBE’s Chapel Street Area Management working group manages the pedestrianised street, which is one of the town’s key retail destinations.

Finally, its business retail and strategy group brings together property owners, retailers and planners to debate how the town’s retail offer should be improved to help it attract more visitors.

The Southport Investment Strategy, a 10-year plan forecasting the development of the town, says it needs another 300,000 sq ft of retail space. It says the town also needs a “high-quality new department store”.

The Southport Partnership says “feelers” have been put out to potential shopping centre developers, who could invest up to £140m in the town, and that retailers such as House of Fraser have expressed an interest in coming to the town.

Jim said: “For a town of this size we have a broad retail offer, because we have so many visitors a year.

“But we do need to raise our game. We need an anchor department store, which we don’t have at the moment and which people expect.

“We don’t have the floorplate for a store that size right in the centre, so that means a redevelopment.

“The other challenge is that we need several 15,000 or 20,000 sq ft floorplates for modern retailers – not full department stores, but stores for modern retailers who need more space than we have.

“The town was largely built in Victorian times. The shops are around 1,000 sq ft each.

“What makes Lord Street, for example, is its Victorian heritage. You can’t just chop and change.

“The economic climate has to improve because there aren’t funds available. But this is our aspiration for the future.”

Southport has been hit hard by the recession, with the collapse of Woolworths in particular leaving a big hole in Chapel Street, but Jim believes the resort’s smaller independent shops are comparatively well-placed to ride out the recession.

All through our conversation we kept returning to our small yet perfectly-formed platters.

My sandwich of the day was a beef and pineapple wrap, served with a tangy chutney. The warm wrap had an almost melt-in-the-mouth quality, with small pieces of beef in a pineapple relish.

Jim’s salmon and avocado rolls were delicious but he particularly enjoyed his four pieces of chicken. The chicken pieces – deep fried, but light-years away from chicken nuggets – were served with a chilli mayonnaise.

The restaurant had a steady stream of visitors, from families of all ages to young couples and fellow besuited types. With its large windows opening up onto busy Lord Street, the V-Café & Sushi Bar is ideally located for a business lunch – and, with its range of sandwiches and light meals, needn’t break the bank.

Too soon it was time to leave, and I walked with Jim along Lord Street, watching him survey his adopted home.

Jim’s broad New York tones mark him out as an exotic beast in Southport, but he insists his years in England have left their mark.

“When I go back to New York with my mates, they say ‘you sound English’,” he said. “My wife cracks up. I must have picked some phrases up here.”