Holly’s world is all peachy and salads

Holly Madison shed four pounds and, to celebrate, she's contemplating opening ... a restaurant?

Not long ago, she started talking with "someone" about creating a "fun concept" with a Vegas location in mind. She just won't say who, what or where.

Yet, it worries me that owning a Hobart meat slicer might encourage the topless Strip star to pack on the lbs., and she just satisfied "Peepshow" demands to trim.

"It'll have good salads," she says.

Madison was telling me this at midnight Sunday in a Planet Hollywood lounge, after she and cast mates of "Holly's World" watched the show's second-season premiere -- while throngs of gawkers stared at her behind ropes.

"You look thin," says me.

"Thanks!" says she.

"I feel good. I feel healthy," she says. "I'm not doing anything extreme. I've just really cleaned up my eating habits, and I've tried to work out more."

Her food routine: snacking on protein bars and fruit, and munching salad with chicken or tuna before "Peepshow."

"I'm not going to go super skinny or totally change. I like having curves," she says.

Everybody who cares about Madison keeps asking me to ask her how she really feels about Hugh Hefner's asking Playmate Crystal Harris to marry him.

Madison knows this question is coming. She giggles, maybe with anticipation or maybe because she's a giggler.

"If I have to pick one dominant emotion, I would say 'protective,' " says she, a woman enmeshed in the netting of reality TV production lingo.

"I just want him to make the right choice, and I'm not sure he's known Crystal long enough. She's really young. She's only 24. I thought, when I was in my 20s, I wanted to settle down. But now that I've been out and seen what I can do, I don't want to settle down for a while now."

Also, Madison still wants to be mayor. "But when I'm way older," she says. "I need a lot of time to learn that stuff. I need to grow more stately looking. So, like, when I'm 60."

Madison's boyfriend, Jack Barakat, guitarist in All Time Low, was absent Sunday; he's on tour. Cast mate Josh Strickland was out sick.

Joining Madison's TV show is fellow Playmate Claire Sinclair, who's been dating Hefner's son Marston. Last year, Sinclair, 19, guest-danced at "MGM Grand's Crazy Horse Paris." She'll disrobe in the revue again in late February or March.

Sinclair, who talks with headstrong ferocity, says Madison's crew is "insanely caring and sweet and down to earth."

I barely recognize Madison's best friend Angel Porrino, 21 -- new glam hair, towering heels and a pair of queens.

"Yeah, I had my boobs done," Porrino says, cheerfully.

She'll be filling in for all of Madison's nine weeks of vacations in 2011.

Porrino is single in Vegas. Her TV co-star Laura Croft, a 2008 Playmate, may or may not be single.

"It depends on who's asking," Croft tells me. "I wanted Johnny Knoxville, but I think he's not available anymore. I used to like Steve-O, but now he's sober, and that doesn't work for me."

SIGHTINGS

Stephen Hawking dined on General Tso's Chicken at Tao on Sunday night, after spending Saturday (as Norm Clarke reported) seeing "O," eating at Tacos & Tequila, and wearing a business suit at the Bellagio pool, and then the world imploded into a wormhole, and the universe, as we know it, expanded into nothingness, just in time to begin a new day in a new universe, and perhaps another taco and tequila.

Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.