Darrell Anderson served as a 6th Army food instructor at Fort Lewis, and when he mustered out in 1950 he went to Edison Technical School to study under the late chef Paul Mullet, spending more than two years in the food trades there and working evenings at Rose's Highway Inn on Highway 99 while he did it. He enrolled in January 1953 under the GI Bill and was taught by Hubert J. Eickman, then instructor in advanced cooking and, from September 1956, head of the department; in February 1954 a minister of the First Christian Church wrote to Eickman to thank him for “the fine training that you are giving him.” Rose Wilcox had hired him as a cook in 1954 for $300 a month, and it was there that he learned the fried chicken recipe he would never give up.
He left to be chef at the Walla Walla Elks Club, the Seattle Golf Club, the Auburn Elks Club and Gleneacres Golf Club, and returned to Rose's as chef-manager in 1964, the year Rose retired on the inn's silver anniversary. He and Jim Binkerd built the three-hundred-pound cake served in the rose garden at her retirement party. He and his wife Catherine leased the restaurant with an option to buy and ran it until 1968, living with their four children in one of the houses on the ten acres behind the kitchen. In 1965 his display of five gelatin-glazed baked chickens won the room at a chefs' convention at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle.
He chaired the Pacific Northwest Chefs de Cuisine Association's Christmas party at the Seattle Center in December 1964, where over 800 people were served, and was a member and past president of that association, a member and past officer of Les Amis d'Escoffier Society of Greater Seattle, and a member of the Washington State Restaurant Association and the American Culinary Federation. Alongside the restaurant he taught full time at the Occupational Skills Center and built an off-premise catering operation — later named King Catering — that fed the Federal Way Boys Club and three school districts, and trained Federal Way High seniors as waiters.
He served the Washington State Chefs Association as president in 1970–71 and again in 1980–81, and contributed recipes to the association's 1976 Favorite Recipes cookbook; the Darrell Anderson Culinary Archives hold the copy from which this site's transcription of that book was made. He compiled the Rose's Highway Inn scrapbook that this archive publishes, and in March 2003 he stood in the parking lot and photographed the restaurant burning down.