Lishui cuisine includes Jinyun sesame seed cake, cod in chicken sauce, braised brook fish, blue crab with egg yolk, mandarin fish in crab sauce, Jinyun clay noodles, mashed meat soup, wheat bean rice, loach with rich tea, hot pot with pickles and so on. Jinyun has a tradition of making sesame cakes. According to legend, Xuanyuan Huangdi put up a furnace for alchemy at Dinghu Peak in Xiandu. When he was hungry, he used mountain springs to make dough and kneaded it on the inner wall of the furnace. The baked cakes were golden in color, crisp and delicious, and fragrant.

This craft has been passed down from generation to generation, and the master of Jinyun sesame seed cake always follows the ancient craft of Jinyun, and selects local good water, good noodles and good meat as raw materials, thus achieving the unique flavor of Jinyun sesame seed cake. The crust of sesame seed cake is crisp and the inner quality is soft and waxy. Take a bite, wheat, meat, onion and sugar are fragrant, salty and light, oily but not greasy, and caramel is slightly sweet.

Oujiang River runs through the whole territory of Lishui and is the mother river of Lishui. Among them, more than 92% of the reach of Liandu section is the national class II water quality standard, and it is rich in aquatic resources, which is the concentration of stream fish in East China, with as many as 1 kinds of wild freshwater fish. The local people used to call it "brook fish", the spotted mandarin fish of Oujiang River, which specializes in the wild fish and shrimp in the river and is the native fish species of Oujiang River.