SM Street, officially Sweet Meat Street, is the great commercial spine of Kozhikode's old centre. It is lined for almost a kilometre with halwa shops, banian-shirt-and-mundu shops, bakeries, gold jewellery showrooms and tiny restaurants. The pedestrianisation in the late 2010s cleared out the worst of the traffic and made it one of the few south Indian shopping streets you can actually walk on.
Stop at the older halwa shops — Mishkhal, Bharath Stores — for a 200-gram slab of cardamom or pineapple halwa wrapped in palm leaf. The street is best in the early evening when the crowds and the lights come up together.