After years of trying to win over lunch and dinner crowds, Starbucks is preparing to open its first stand-alone Italian restaurant. The company is teaming up with Princi, a small chain of 24-hour bakeries in Milan and London, to offer customers freshly made items including focaccia sandwiches, margherita pizzas and tiramisu. The first stage of the partnership will debut Tuesday, when Starbucks opens a Princi bakery in its upscale Reserve Roastery in Seattle. 

The company plans to eventually open bakeries inside all of its Reserve locations, and next year hopes to open stand-alone Princi eateries across the country. The openings will be in New York, Seattle and Chicago. “We’re getting into the food business,” Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, said in an interview. “Princi will be fully integrated with bakery operations, so not only will we be roasting coffee, but we’ll be baking bread, pastries — the kind of Italian pastries you’ve never seen in America.”