To Nicolás Andruskiewitsch on his 60th birthday, with admiration We introduce bivariate versions of the continuous [Formula: see text]-Hermite polynomials. We obtain algebraic properties for them (generating function, explicit expressions in terms of the univariate ones, backward difference equations and recurrence relations) and analytic properties (determining the orthogonality measure). We find a direct link between bivariate continuous [Formula: see text]-Hermite polynomials and the star product method of [S. Kolb and M. Yakimov, Symmetric pairs for Nichols algebras of diagonal type via star products, Adv. Math. 365 (2020), Article ID: 107042, 69 pp.] for quantum symmetric pairs to establish deformed quantum Serre relations for quasi-split quantum symmetric pairs of Kac–Moody type. We prove that these defining relations are obtained from the usual quantum Serre relations by replacing all monomials by multivariate orthogonal polynomials.